T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Her left eye was swollen closed, maroon and black; the other leered and goggled in a frightening, deranged way. She fixed the bad character with a look that would freeze a bowl of chili, and then she raised her arm and the women burst into song, their voices pitched high and fanatical, the rush of adrenaline and moral fervor swelling their bosoms and raking the rafters:

Praise ye the Lord.

Praise ye the Lord from the heavens:

Praise ye Him in the heights.

Praise ye Him, all ye angels:

Praise ye Him, all His hosts.

Praise ye Him, sun and moon.

Praise ye Him, all ye stars of light.

We were defeated, instantly and utterly. The bad character hung his head, the barkeep wrung his bar rag, two of the cronies actually joined in the singing. McGurk cursed under his breath while I fought the impulse to harmonize, a childhood of choir rehearsals and gleaming organ pipes welling up in my eyes. Then she brandished the hatchet, waving it high over her head like a Blackfoot brave, the other women following suit, drawing their weapons from the folds of their gowns. They laid waste to the barroom, splinter by splinter, howling hosannas all the while, and no one lifted a finger to stop them.

I watched my beer foam out over the pitted counter, and somewhere, from the depths of the building, I recognized the odor of beefsteak burned to the bottom of an iron fry pan.

We decided to strike back. The ruins of the Copper Dollar Saloon lay strewn about us: splinters and sawdust, the scalloped curls of broken glass, puddles of froth. I reached across the table and grabbed hold of McGurk’s wrist. “We’ll do an expose, front page,” I said, “and back it up with an editorial on civil liberties.” McGurk grinned like a weasel in a chicken coop. I told him to get on the wire and dig up something on Mrs. Mad that would take some of the teeth out of her bite. Then I trundled off home to get some sleep.

An hour later he was knocking at my door. I threw on a robe and opened up, and he burst into the parlor, his eyes shrunk back and feverish. I offered him a chair and a brandy. He waved them away. “Name’s Carry Gloyd Nation,” he said. “Born in ‘46 in Kentucky. Married Charles Gloyd, M.D., in ‘67—and get this — she left him after two months because he was a rummy. She married Nation ten years later and he divorced her just a few months back on the grounds of desertion.”

“Desertion?”

“Yep. She’s been running around tearing up saloons and tobacco shops and Elks and Moose lodges all over the Midwest. Arrested in Fort Dodge for setting fire to a tobacco shop, in Lawrence for tearing the dress off a woman in the street because she was wearing a corset. Spent three days in jail in St. Louis for assaulting the owner of a Chinese restaurant. She claims Chinese food is immoral.”

I held up my palm. “All right. Fine. Go home and get some sleep and then work this thing up for tomorrow’s paper. Especially the arrest record. We’ll take some of the edge off that hatchet, all right.”

We ran the story next day. Two-inch headlines, front page. On the inside, just under a thought-provoking piece on the virtues of the motorcar as the waste-free vehicle of the future, I ran a crisp editorial on First and Fourth Amendment guarantees and the tyranny of the majority. It was a mistake.

By 8 A.M. there were two hundred women outside the office singing “We Shall Overcome” and chaining themselves to the railing. Banners waved over the throng, DEMON ALCOHOL and JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE, and one grim woman held up a caricature of me with a bottle in my hand and the sun sinking into its neck. The legend beneath it read: THE TOPEKA SUN SETS.

None of my employees showed up for work — even McGurk deserted me. At eight-fifteen his son Jimmy slipped into the front office. He’d come to tell me his father was sick. Well so was I. I bolted the door after him and dodged into the back room to consult a bottle of Kentucky bourbon I kept on hand for emergencies. I took a long swallow while snatches of song, speechifying, cheers and shouts sifted in from the street. Then there was a crash in the front office. I peered through the doorway and saw that the window had been shattered — on the floor beneath it lay the gleaming blade, tough oaken handle of a hatchet.

Someone was pounding on the front door. I crept to the window and peeped out. The crows now filled the street. Reverend Thorpe was there, a group of Mennonites in beards and black, another hundred women. I thought I saw McGurk’s wife Lucy in the press, obscured by the slow helix of smoke that rose from a heap of still-folded newspapers. I wondered where the Sheriff was.

The door had now begun to heave on its hinges with each successive blow. It was at this point that I altered my line of perspective and saw that it was Mrs. Mad herself at the door, hammering away with the mallet head of her hatchet. “Open up!” she bellowed. “I demand a retraction of those Satan-serving lies! Open up — I say!” On hands and knees, like an Indian fighter or a scout for Teddy Roosevelt, I made my way to the back room, took another pull at the bung and then ducked out the loading entrance. I tugged the hat down over my brow and headed for Doge’s Place to regroup.

Doge had replaced the swinging doors with a three-inch-thick oak slab, which was kept bolted at all times. I tapped at the door and a metal flap opened at eye level. “It’s me, Doge,” I said, and the bolt shot back. Inside, two workmen were busy with hammer and saw, and Cal sat at a table with canvas, palette and a bottle of whisky, shakily reproducing the portrait of Vivian DeLorbe from the defaced original. Beside him, hanging his head like a skunked coonhound, was McGurk.

I stepped up to the improvised bar (a pair of sawhorses and a splintery plank) and threw down two quick whiskeys. Then I sauntered over to join Cal and McGurk. McGurk muttered an apology for leaving me to face the music alone. “Forget it, John,” I said.

“They got Lucy, you know,” he said.

“I know.”

Doge pulled up a chair and for a long moment we sat there silent, watching Cal trace the quivering perimeter of Vivian DeLorbe’s bust. Then Doge asked me if I was going to retract the story. I told him hell would freeze over first. McGurk pointed out that we’d be out of business in a week if I didn’t. Doge cursed Mrs. Mad. McGurk cursed Temperance. We had a drink on it.

Cal laid down his brush and gave me a watery-eyed stare. “Know how you git yerself rid of ‘er?”

“I’d give a hundred silver dollars to know that, friend,” Doge said.

“Simple,” Cal croaked, choking off to clear his throat and expectorate on the floor. “Git hold on that first husband of hers — Doc Gloyd. Sight of him and she’ll scare out of town like a horse with his ass-hairs afire.”

The three of us came alive, hope springing eternal, et cetera, and we pressed him for details. Did he know Gloyd? Could he find him? Would Gloyd consent to it? Cal lifted the derby to smooth back his hair and then launched a windy narrative that jumped around like a palsied frog. Seems he’d been on a three-week drunk with “the Doc” in St. Louis’s skid row six months earlier. The Doc had come into some money — a twenty-dollar gold piece — and the two of them had lain out in a field behind a distillery until they’d gone through it. “Fresh-corked bottles of the smoothest, fifty cent,” said Cal, his eyes gone the color of butter. When he’d asked Gloyd about the twenty, Gloyd told him it was a token of gratitude from the thirsty citizens of Manhattan, Kansas. They’d paid his train-fare and soaked him full of hooch to come out and rid the town of a plague.

“Mrs. Mad?” I said.