T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The band concluded with a crunching metallic shriek and Cassandra and I made our way back to the table. “Who was that?” I asked Jane.

“Who was who?”

“That mustachioed murderer’s apprentice you were sitting with.”

“Oh,” she said. “Him.”

I realized that Cassandra was still clutching my hand.

“Just an acquaintance.”

As we pulled in to the drive at Steventon, I observed a horse tethered to one of the palings. The horse lifted its tail, then dropped it. Jane seemed suddenly animated. She made a clucking sound and called to the horse by name. The horse flicked its ears. I asked her if she liked horses. “Hm?” she said, already looking off toward the silhouettes that played across the parlor curtains. “Oh yes, yes. Very much so,” she said, and then she released the seat belt, flung back the door and tripped up the stairs into the house. I killed the engine and stepped out into the dark drive. Crickets sawed their legs together in the bushes. Cassandra held out her hand.

Cassandra led me into the parlor, where I was startled to see the mustachioed ne’er-do-well from the Mooncalf. He held a teacup in his hand. His boots shone as if they’d been razor-stropped. He was talking quietly with Jane.

“Well, well,” said the Reverend, stepping out of the shadows. “Enjoy yourselves?”

“Oh, immensely, Father,” said Cassandra.

Jane was grinning at me again. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “Have you met Mr. Crawford?” The brothers, with their fine bones and disproportionate heads, gathered round. Crawford’s sideburns reached nearly to the line of his jaw. His mustache was smooth and black. I held out my hand. He shifted the teacup and gave me a firm handshake. “Delighted,” he said.

We found seats (Crawford shoved in next to Jane on the love seat; I wound up on the settee between Cassandra and a brother in naval uniform), and the maid served tea and cakes. Something was wrong — of that I was sure. The brothers were not their usual witty selves, the Reverend floundered in the midst of a critique of Coleridge’s cult of artifice, Cassandra dropped a stitch. In the corner, Crawford was holding a whispered colloquy with Jane. Her cheeks, which tended toward the flaccid, were now positively bloated, and flushed with color. It was then that it came to me. “Crawford,” I said, getting to my feet. “Henry Crawford?”

He sprang up like a gunfighter summoned to the O.K. Corral. “That’s right,” he leered. His eyes were deep and cold as crevasses. He looked pretty formidable — until I realized that he couldn’t have been more than five-three or — four, give or take an inch for his heels.

Suddenly I had hold of his elbow. The Tiki medallion trembled at my throat. “I’d like a word with you outside,” I said. “In the garden.”

The brothers were on their feet. The Reverend spilled his tea. Crawford jerked his arm out of my grasp and stalked through the door that gave onto the garden. Nightsounds grated in my ears, the brothers murmured at my back, and Jane, as I pulled the door closed, grinned at me as if I’d just told the joke of the century.

Crawford was waiting for me in the ragged shadows of the trees, turned to face me like a bayed animal. I felt a surge of power. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch, but, in keeping with the times, I settled for “cad.” “You cad,” I said, shoving him back a step, “how dare you come sniffing around here after what you did to Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park ? It’s people like you — corrupt, arbitrary, egocentric — that foment all the lust and heartbreak of the world and challenge the very possibility of happy endings.”

“Hah!” he said. Then he stepped forward and the moon fell across his face. His eyes were like the birth of evil. In his hand, a riding glove. He slapped my face with it. “Tomorrow morning, at dawn,” he hissed. “Beneath the bridge.”

“Okay, wiseguy,” I said, “okay,” but I could feel the Titanic sinking into my belt.

A moment later the night was filled with the clatter of hoofs.

I was greeted by silence in the parlor. They stared at me, sated, as I stepped through the door. Except for Cassandra, who mooned from behind her knitting, and Jane, who was bent over a notebook, scribbling away like a court reporter. The Reverend cleared his throat and Jane looked up. She scratched off another line or two and then rose to show me out. She led me through the parlor and down the hall to the front entrance. We paused at the door.

“I’ve had a memorable evening,” she said, and then glanced back to where Cassandra had appeared at the parlor door. “Do come again.” And then she held out her hands.

Her hands were cold.

(1977)

Orlando’s uncle fathered thirty-two children. Fifteen by the first wife, five by the second, twelve by the third. Now he lives with a Canadian woman, postmenopausal. You can hear them after the generator shuts down. When the island is still and dark as a dreamless sleep, and the stone crabs crawl out of their holes.

The ground here is pocked with dark craters, burrows, veins in the earth. They are beginnings and endings. Some small as coins, others big enough to swallow a softball. The crabs creep down these orifices like the functions of the body.

Fran has a gas stove, a bed, some shelves, a battery-run tape player. She cooks. People who weren’t born here can sit on the edge of the bed and eat, sip rum with her. Then unwrinkle some bills. Fran cooks lobster, or conch, sometimes she cooks stone crab. She was not born here either, her bed is narrow, and the batteries in the tape player are getting weak.

Orlando sets and checks lobster traps. All the men on the island set and check lobster traps. The traps are made of wooden strips, shaped like Quonset huts, a conical entranceway at one end. Bait is unnecessary. The lobster, scouting the margins of the reef, the sea chanting over him, will prowl around this trap until he finds the conical entranceway. He will scrabble into the trap, delighted, secure from attack. The lobster psyche takes solace in holes. When the traps are hauled the law requires the fishermen to release any lobster whose tail is smaller than three inches, a seeding measure. The fishermen do not release lobsters whose tails are smaller than three inches — nor do they take them to market. Instead they twist off the heads, make a welter of the sweet curled tails, black against the frayed and blanched floorboards of their boats, carry the bloodless white meat home to their pots. Orlando tells me that the lobster catch is smaller this season than it was a year ago, and that a year ago it was smaller than the preceding season. I nod my head. Like the point of a cone I say.

There are no roads, sidewalks, automobiles, bicycles or shoes on the island.

Tito is a grandson of Orlando’s uncle. Orlando’s uncle does not know it. The island’s population is just over three hundred. It is not surprising that a good number of the island’s inhabitants should be related to Orlando’s uncle, considering his energy. Tito does not live in the village, but in a shack in the jungle on the far side of the island. He lives alone, his eyes blue, his mother (now dead) English. Tito roams the forest with his.22, putting holes in birds and lizards. Their carcasses fertilize the soil. When he is hungry he lifts a lobster trap, spears fish, dives for conch. Or splits coconut.

The sun here is mellow as an orange. One day it will flare up and turn the solar system to cinders. Then it will fall into itself, suck in the ribbons of flame like a pale ember, gather its last breath and explode, driving particles eternally through the universe, cosmic wind.