T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The sea is calm, the ship motionless beneath us, held fast in a liquid vise. “I’m too old for exploring,” I say finally. “My feet hurt. There are no more wonders for me.” I look him dead in the eye. “I’ve cooked my last meal aboard this ship.”

And now the look of surprise, of consternation, of a befuddlement so deep you would have thought I was a talking eel or a puffer fish reciting La Nymphe de la Seine. “But you can’t do that — you’ve signed the articles. I’d have to, to put you in chains….”

I feel myself giving way — I can’t take this anymore, not another minute. I spit my words out, vomit them up, and I don’t care, I don’t. “Spanish Rice!” I shout. “Chuck Wagon Beans, Tuna Surprise, Macaroni and Cheese!”

And so, the next morning, as dawn breaks over the sea, I find myself confined to quarters, Laffite, the sponge man, standing guard over me as if I were some shipwrecked loon or common provocateur. I can smell from afar the sordid amateur attempts at breakfast, the blackened and fallen bread, the ruined coffee. My stomach stirs as I watch Laffite slump over the farce of his pistol, his heavy face drawn with hunger and fatigue. “What would you give, Laffite,” I say, as the morning swell drops us into a trough and buffets us back up again, “for a nice crisply presented caneton Tour d’Argent or a filet de boeuf en croûte? Eh? How many baskets of your precious sponges? Or would you prefer to eat them? “

The big man, with his big head and suffering eyes, looks queasy. “I warn you,” he says, and he clutches at the pistol with fat sweating fingers.

“Remember the petites brioches I used to make in the mornings, still hot from the oven? The way the butter would sink into them? Or the pain de campagne , a loaf per man?”

“Madman,” he snarls. “Fiend. Shut up!”

But I go on and on till he’s at the breaking point, till he’s either going to have to shoot me or give up the charade and let me climb above decks and guide the misguided. He’s giving way, I can see it, but then, right in the middle of my loving re-creation of the recipe for roast leg of venison with poivrade sauce, there’s a shout from above followed almost immediately by the most piteous outpouring of shock and lament I’ve ever heard. Laffite drops the pistol as if it’s suddenly come to life and bitten him and we leap simultaneously to our feet and fling ourselves out the door and up the companionway. A moment later, out of breath, we emerge on deck to a scene of purgatorial despair. Borchardt is beating his head against the rail, Falco striding up and down the boards shouting “All hands on deck!” Piccard hiding his face and weeping like a schoolgirl. The Captain and Dr. Mazzy Gort, huddled by the babyscaph in their deep-sea explorer’s costumes, can only blink and stare — they couldn’t look any more confused if the ship had hit a reef.

There in the water, all round the ship, is a deep red stain, a stain that might have been the life’s blood of a hundred crews, already paling to dissolution in the brine. I look to Sancerre and his reckless smile, to Saôut and his suicidal eyes, and I know that this is not blood, but wine, cru bourgeois , five hundred gallons at least. The voyage is over. The bottom will remain inviolate, the fishes undisturbed. Cousteau is defeated.

It is my moment, and I seize it. “Rally round, men!” I cry, my heart contracting like a fist. “Weigh anchor! We’re going home!”

No one moves. The wind lifts the hair over our ears, the wine-dark sea heaves at the hull. All eyes turn to Cousteau. Wearily, sunk into the pouches and wrinkles of his obsession, he takes a step forward and burns us all with his eyes.

“Deeper,” he says, “we must go deeper.”

Falco is the first to fracture the tableau. Stooped and sun-blasted, his face unreadable, he breaks ranks with the men to stride across the deck and stand with the Captain. Dr. Mazzy Gort is next. He looks from Falco to Cousteau and then to the rest of us and can’t suppress a whinny of apprehension: he may be an American, but he can see what’s coming. “It’s all over!” I shout. “Give it up!”

Cousteau ignores me. He just pulls on his hood and thermal jacket and climbs into the bathyscaph, that fat sputnik of the deeps suspended from the crane at the stern of the ship. I can see him there, in hawkish profile, fiddling with the controls through the rictus of the open door. He gestures impatiently to Mazzy Gort, but the American hesitates, and in the moment of his hesitation Falco moves to the Captain’s side, disappearing aloft in the shadows of the diving capsule. The steel doors crank shut.

It’s up to me now. Up to me to order the bathyscaph set in motion and dropped over the side into the yawning mouth of the waves, up to me to cut the throats of thirty individual years, one by one, as cleanly and surely as I cut the lifeline with a torch and insure, once and for all, that Costeau finds what he’s seeking. For a moment the responsibility paralyzes me. The men — Sancerre, Saôut, Piccard, even Laffite and Dr. Mazzy Gort — watch me in silence, hardly daring to swallow. And then the breeze shifts direction, carrying all the way out from some distant shore, a breeze smelling impossibly of pork roast, of beef, of goose and quail and duck à l’orange, and I know I can do anything, anything at all.

(1995)

It wasn’t the cast that bothered him — the thing was like rock, like a weapon, and that was just how he would use it — and it wasn’t the hyperextended knee or the hip pointer or the yellowing contusions seeping into his thighs and hams and lower back or even the gouged eye that was swollen shut and drooling a thin pale liquid the color of dishwater; no, it was the humiliation. Fifty-six to nothing. That was no mere defeat; it was a drubbing, an ass-kicking, a rape, the kind of thing the statisticians and sports nerds would snigger over as long as there were records to keep. He’d always felt bigger than life in his pads and helmet, a hero, a titan, but you couldn’t muster much heroism lying facedown in the mud at fifty-six to nothing and with the other team’s third string in there. No, the cast didn’t bother him, not really, though it itched like hell and his hand was a big stippled piece of meat sticking out of the end of it, or the eye either, though it was ugly, pure ugly. The trainer had sent him to the eye doctor and the doctor had put some kind of blue fluid in the eye and peered into it with a little conical flashlight and said there was no lasting damage, but still it was swollen shut and he couldn’t study for his Physical Communications exam.

It was Sunday, the day after the game, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot, right guard for the Caledonia College Shuckers, slept till two, wrapped in his own private misery — and even then he couldn’t get out of bed. Every fiber of his body, all six feet, four inches and two hundred sixty-eight pounds of it, shrieked with pain. He was twenty-two years old, a senior, his whole life ahead of him, and he felt like he was ready for the nursing home. There was a ringing in his ears, his eyelashes were welded together, his lower back throbbed and both his knees felt as if ice picks had been driven into them. He hobbled, splayfooted and naked, to the bathroom at the end of the hall, and there was blood in the toilet bowl when he was done.

All his life he’d been a slow fat pasty kid, beleaguered and tormented by his quick-footed classmates, until he found his niche on the football field, where his bulk, stubborn and immovable, had proved an advantage — or so he’d thought. He’d drunk the protein drink, pumped the iron, lumbered around the track like some geriatric buffalo, and what had it gotten him? Caledonia had gone 0-43 during his four years on the varsity squad, never coming closer than two touchdowns even to a tie — and the forty-third loss had been the hardest. Fifty-six to nothing. He’d donned a football helmet to feel good about himself, to develop pride and poise, to taste the sweet nectar of glory, but somehow he didn’t feel all that glorious lying there flat on his back and squinting one-eyed at Puckett and Poplar’s Principles of Physical Communications: A Text , until the lines shifted before him like the ranks of X’s and O’s in the Coach’s eternal diagrams. He dozed. Woke again to see the evening shadows closing over the room. By nightfall, he felt good enough to get up and puke.