T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Suddenly the light flicks on. It is Rita, all thighs and calves in her majorette’s outfit. But what’s this? There’s a man with her, a stranger. “Is this it?” the man says.

“Well, of course it is, silly.”

“But who are these chibonies?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Citroen, the woman is the Cougar and the old guy on the end is the Audi.”

“And I’m the Jaguar, is that it?”

“You’re more to me than a machine, Jeff. Do you know that I like you? A lot.”

B. is mortally wounded. Enemy flak, they’ve hit him in the guts. He squeezes his eyes shut, stops his ears, but he can hear them just the same: heavy breathing, a moan soft as fur, the rush of zippers. But then the buzzer sounds and Rita gasps. “A customer!” she squeals, struggling back into her clothes and then hurrying off through the Geriatrics hangar, her footsteps like pinpricks along the spine. “Hey!” the new guy bellows. But she’s gone.

The new guy sighs, then selects a cot and beds down beside B. B. can hear him removing his things, gargling from a bottle, whispering prayers to himself—“Bless Mama, Uncle Ernie, Bear Bryant … “—then the room dashes into darkness and B. can open his eyes.

He fights back a cough. His heart is hammering. He thinks how pleasant it would be to die … but then thinks how pleasant it would be to step through the door of his apartment again, take a hot shower and crawl into bed. It is then that the vision comes to him — a waking dream — shot through with color and movement and depth. He sees Tegeler’s Big Lot, the ranks of cars, new Tegelers, lines of variegated color like beads on a string, windshields glinting in the sun, antennae jabbing at the sky, stiff and erect, like the swords of a conquering army….

In the dark, beneath the blanket, he reaches for his checkbook.

(1977)

There is, essentially, one city in our country. It is a city in which everyone wears a hat, works in an office, jogs, and eats simply but elegantly, a city above all, in which everyone covets shoes. Italian shoes, in particular. Oh, you can get by with a pair of domestically made pumps or cordovans of the supplest sheepskin, or even, in the languid days of summer, with huaraches or Chinese slippers made of silk or even nylon. There are those who claim to prefer running shoes — Puma, Nike, Saucony — winter and summer. But the truth is, what everyone wants — for the status, the cachet, the charm and refinement — are the Italian loafers and ankle boots, hand-stitched and with a grain as soft and rich as, well — is this the place to talk of the private parts of girls still in school?

My uncle — call him Dagoberto — imports shoes. From Italy. And yet, until recently, he himself could barely afford a pair. It’s the government, of course. Our country — the longest and leanest in the world — is hemmed in by the ocean on one side, the desert and mountains on the other, and the government has leached and pounded it dry till sometimes I think we live atop a stupendous, three-thousand-mile-long strip of jerky. There are duties — prohibitive duties — on everything. Or, rather, on everything we want. Cocktail napkins, Band-Aids, Tupperware, crescent wrenches, and kimchi come in practically for nothing. But the things we really crave — microwaves, Lean Cuisine, CDs, leisure suits, and above all, Italian shoes — carry a duty of two and sometimes three hundred percent. The government is unfriendly. We are born, we die, it rains, it clears, the government is unfriendly. Facts of life.

Uncle Dagoberto is no revolutionary — none of us are; let’s face it, we manage — but the shoe situation was killing him. He’d bring his shoes in, arrange them seductively in the windows of his three downtown shops, and there they’d languish, despite a markup so small he’d have to sell a hundred pairs just to take his shopgirls out to lunch. It was intolerable. And what made it worse was that the good citizens of our city, vain and covetous as they are, paraded up and down in front of his very windows in shoes identical to those he was selling — shoes for which they’d paid half price or less. And how were these shoes getting through customs and finding their way to the dark little no-name shops in the ill-lit vacancies of waterfront warehouses? Ask the Black Hand, Los Dedos Muertos, the fat and corrupt Minister of Commerce.

For months, poor Uncle Dagoberto brooded over the situation, while his wife (my mother’s sister, Carmen, a merciless woman) and his six daughters screamed for the laser facials, cellular phones, and Fila sweats he could no longer provide for them. He is a heavyset man, my uncle, and balding, and he seemed to grow heavier and balder during those months of commercial despair. But one morning, as he came down to breakfast in the gleaming, tiled expanse of the kitchen our families share in the big venerable old mansion on La Calle Verdad, there was a spring in his step and look on his face that, well — there is a little shark in the waters here, capable of smelling out one part of blood in a million parts of water, and when he does smell out that impossible single molecule of blood, I imagine he must have a look like that of Uncle Dagoberto on that sunstruck morning on La Calle Verdad.

“Tomás,” he said to me, rubbing his hands over his Bran Chex, Metamusil, and decaffeinated coffee, “we’re in business.”

The kitchen was deserted at that hour. My aunts and sisters were off jogging, Dagoberto’s daughters at the beach, my mother busy with aerobics, and my father — my late, lamented father — lying quiet in his grave. I didn’t understand. I looked up at him blankly from my plate of microwave waffles.

His eyes darted round the room. There was a sheen of sweat on his massive, close-shaven jowls. He began to whistle — a tune my mother used to sing me, by Grandmaster Flash — and then he broke off and gave me a gold-capped smile. “The shoe business,” he said. “There’s fifteen hundred in it for you.”

I was at the university at the time, studying semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction. I myself owned two sleek pairs of Italian loafers, in ecru and rust. Still, I wasn’t working, and I could have used the money. “I’m listening,” I said.

What he wanted me to do was simple — simple, but potentially dangerous. He wanted me to spend two days in the north, in El Puerto Libre — Freeport. There are two free ports in our country, separated by nearly twenty-five hundred miles of terrain that looks from the air like the spine of some antediluvian monster. The southern port is called Calidad, or Quality. Both are what I imagine the great bazaars of Northern Africa and the Middle East to have been in the time of Marco Polo or Rommel, percolating cauldrons of sin and plenty, where anything known to man could be had for the price of a haggle. But there was a catch, of course. While you could purchase anything you liked in El Puerto Libre or Calidad, to bring it back to the city you had to pay duty — the same stultifying duty merchants like Uncle Dagoberto were obliged to pay. And why then had the government set up the free ports in the first place? In order to make digital audio tape and microwaves available to themselves, of course, and to set up discreet banking enterprises for foreigners, by way of generating cash flow — and ultimately, I think, to frustrate the citizenry. To keep us in our place. To remind us that government is unfriendly.

At any rate, I was to go north on the afternoon plane, take a room under the name “Chilly Buttons,” and await Uncle Dagoberto’s instructions. Fine. For me, the trip was nothing. I relaxed with a Glenlivet and Derrida, the film was Death Wish VII , and the flight attendants small in front and, well, substantial behind, just the way I like them. On arriving, I checked into the hotel he’d arranged for me — the girl behind the desk had eyes and shoulders like one of the amazons of the North American cinema, but she tittered and showed off her orthodontia when I signed “Chilly Buttons” in the register — and I went straight up to my room to await Uncle Dagoberto’s call. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot: he’d given me an attaché case in which there were five hundred huevos — our national currency — and a thousand black-market dollars. “I don’t anticipate any problems,” he’d told me as he handed me onto the plane, “but you never know, eh?”