T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

We ran — down the steps and into the mud. I slipped and fell, while Gesh hustled off through the blinding downpour. It was deeper now, lying about the low spots in nasty red-black puddles. I could feel it seeping in, trickling down my leg, inside the boot: warm, sticky, almost hot. The smell of putrefaction nauseated me. I choked back the apricot nectar and biscuits, struggled up, and ran for the car. When I got there Gesh was standing beside the door, blooddrops thrashing about him. “What about the seats?” he said. “If we stain ‘em with this shit, it’ll never come off.”

“Fuck it. Let’s just get out of this—”

“I mean I got a lot of scratch invested in this here BMW, bro—”

The wind-whipped blood flailed our yellow slickers, dripped from the flapping brims of our silly yellow rain hats. We both climbed in. The engine started smooth, like a vacuum cleaner; the wipers clapped to and fro; the windshield smeared. “Let’s drive to the desert … the Arizona desert, and get away from this … shit,” I said. My voice was weak. I felt ill. Automatically I reached for the window. “Hey — what the fuck you doing?” Gesh said. It streamed down the inside of the glass, bubbled over the upholstered door, puddled in the ashtray on the armrest. I rolled the window up. “I feel sick,” I said. “Well for christsake, puke outside.” I didn’t. The thought of hanging my head out in that insane unnatural downpour brought it up right there. In the sealed compartment the bouquet of the vomit and the stink of the mud-blood on our shoes was insupportable. I retched again: then dry-retched. “Oh shit,” said Gesh.

“I’m going back in,” I said, the edge of a whimper in my voice.

Five minutes later, Gesh returned, cursing. Scott was on his way out the door, three cameras strung round his neck, to get some color slides of the dripping trees. “What’s the matter,” he said. “You back already?”

“Couldn’t see a fucking thing. I got down the end of the drive and smacked into the stone wall. The wipers are totally useless — they just smear the crap all over the windshield. It’s like looking through a finger painting.”

“So what happened to the car?”

“It’s not too bad — I was only going about two miles an hour.”

Alice emerged from the kitchen, a pair of lighted candles in her hand, egg-walking to avoid spilling the hot wax. “Gesh! Take your slicker off — you’re dripping that shit all over the floor…. Couldn’t make it, huh?”

“No.”

“What are we going to do for food?” she asked.

“Scoop it up!” Walt shouted from the living room. “Scoop it up and pour it into balloons. Make blood pudding.”

I was sitting in a chair, weak, stinking, blood crusting the lines of my hands. “I’m fed up with it,” I said. “I’m going up to lie down.”

“Good idea,” said Gesh. “Think I’ll join you.”

“Me too,” said Alice. “Can’t do anything here — can’t even read or listen to music.”

“Yeah,” said Walt. “Good idea. Save me a pillow.”

“Me too,” said Amy.

Scott stepped from beneath the cameras, strung them across the back of my chair. He yawned. Isabelle said it would be better if we all went to bed. She expressed a hope that after a long nap things would somehow come to their senses.

I woke from fevered dreams (a tropical forest: me in jodhpurs and pith helmet — queasy-faced — sharing a draft of warm cow’s blood and milk with tree-tall Masai warriors) to a rubicund dimness, and the gentle breathing of the rest of the crew. They loomed, a humpbacked mound in the bed beside me. My ears were keen. Still it beat on the roof, sloshed in the gutters. Downstairs, somewhere, I heard the sound of running water, the easy soughing gurgle of a mountain stream. I sat up. Were we leaking? I slipped into Amy’s slippers, lit a candle, crept apprehensively down the stairs. I searched the hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom: nothing. A cat began wailing somewhere. The basement! The cat bolted out when I opened the door, peered down the dark shaft of the stairway. The flood was up nearly to the fifth step, almost four feet deep, I guessed, and more churning audibly in. The stench was stifling. I slammed the door. For the first time I thought of the dike: why ‘sblood! if the dike went — it must be straining at its foundations this very minute! I envisioned us out there, heroically stacking sandbags, the wind in our faces, whipping our hair back, the rising level of the flood registered in our stoic eyes — then I thought of the tepid plasma seething in my nose, my mouth, my eyes, and felt ill.

Gesh came down the stairs, scratching himself sleepily. “How’s it?” he said. I advised him to take a look at the cellar. He did. “Holy shit! We’ve got to do something — start making barricades, strapping floatables together, evacuating women and children — and dogs!” He paused. “I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s go see what we got left, bro.” From the kitchen I could hear him taking inventory: “Two six-packs of warm Coke; a jar of Skippy peanut butter, crunchy — no bread; ten cans of stewed tomatoes; half a box of granola; a quart of brown rice; one tin of baby smoked oysters. Not a fuck of a lot. Hey Mark, join me in a late-afternoon snack?”

“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”

We sat around the darkened living room that night, a single candle guttering, the sound of bloodfall ticking at the windows, the hiss of rapids rushing against the stone walls of the house, an insidious sloshing in the basement. Seepage had begun at the front door, and Isabelle had dumped a fifty-pound bag of kitty litter there in an attempt to absorb the moisture. Atop that was a restraining dike of other absorbent materials: boxes of cake mix, back issues of Cosmopolitan , electric blankets, Italian dictionaries, throw pillows, three dogs, a box of Tampax. A similar barricade protected the basement door. When Gesh had last opened the window to look, the red current eddying against the house had reached almost to the windowsill. We were deeply concerned, hungry, bored. “I’m bored,” said Amy.

“I’m hungry,” whined Scott. “And I’m sick of Coke. I want a hot cup of Mu tea.”

“It stinks in here,” carped Isabelle. “Reminds me of when I was fifteen, working in the meat department at the A & P.”

“My teeth are gritty,” Alice said. “Wish the water and the damned toothbrushes would work.”

Blood began to drip from the windowsill in the far corner of the room. It puddled atop the thirty-six-inch Fisher speaker in the corner. One of the cats began to lap at it.

Walt paced the room, a man dislocated. Deprived of his bass, he was empty, devoid of spirit, devoid of personality. He was incapable now of contributing to our meaningful dialogue on the situation. Gesh, however, tried to amuse us, take our minds off it. He said it was just a simple case of old mother earth menstruating, and that by tomorrow, the last day of the moon’s cycle, it would no doubt stop. He passed around a fifth of Châteauneuf and a thin joint. The pool beneath the door began to spread across the floor, creeping, growing, fanning out to where we sat in a small circle, the candlelight catching the blood in our flared nostrils. Shocked silent, we watched its inexorable approach as it glided out from the barricade in fingerlike projections, seeking the lowest point. The lowest point, it appeared, was directly beneath the Naugahyde pillow upon which my buttocks rested. Slowly, methodically, the bulbous finger of blood stretched toward me, pointed at me. When it was about a foot away, I stood. “I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m taking two Tuinals. Try not to wake me.”

It was morning when I woke. Gesh sat in a chair beside the bed, smoking a cigarette. The others slept. “It stopped,” he said. He was right: the only sound was a sporadic drip-drip beyond the windows, a poststorm runoff. The celestial phlebotomy had ceased. “Good,” was all I could manage. But I was elated, overjoyed, secure again! Life returned to normal!