T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“You guessed it,” said Cal, a rasping snicker working its way up his throat. “All she got to do is see him. It’s liken to holdin a cross up front of a vampire.”

Two hours later Cal and I were leaning back in the club car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, trying out their sipping whiskey, savoring a cigar, heading east. For St. Louis.

We were feeling pretty ripe by the time we stepped down at the St. Louis station. I was a bit disoriented, what with the railway yard alone half the size of Topeka proper, and what with the rush of men in derby hats and short coats and women with their backsides hefted up all out of proportion. Cal, on the other hand, was right at home. He stooped to pluck up a cigar butt and then swaggered through the crowd to where a man, all tatters and ribs, sat propped against a bench like a discarded parasol. The man sat on the pavement, his elbows splayed on the bench behind him, head hanging as if his neck had been broken. Cal plunked down beside him like a wornout drayhorse, oblivious to the suspicious-looking puddle the fellow was sitting in. The man’s eyelids drooped open as Cal produced a bottle and handed it to him. The man drank, held the bottle up for Cal. Cal drank, handed it back. They conferred, sniggering, for five or ten minutes, then Cal rose with a crack of knee and beckoned to me. “He’s in town, all right, the salty dog. Redfearns here seen him yestiddy.” I glanced down at Redfearns. He looked as if he hadn’t seen anything in a long while. “Is he sure?”

“Down by the docks,” Cal croaked, already whistling for a hackney cab.

We left our things — my things, Cal had nothing but the hat on his head and a pair of suspenders — at Potter’s Saloon, Beds Five Cents, corner of Wharf St. and Albermarle Ave. Potter sold us two bottles of local whiskey for research purposes and we strolled out. to explore the underworld of the docks and environs. Each time we passed a supine figure in the street Cal stopped to make an identity check, and if expedient, to revive it with a slug or two of Potter’s poison. Then followed a period of bottle passing and sniggering colloquy that twinned the Redfearns encounter as if they’d rehearsed it.

After a while I found myself heaving down beside Cal and these reeking winesoaks, the sun building a campfire under my hat, trousers soiled. taking my turn when the bottle was passed. There I sat, Editor in Chief of The Topeka Sun , a freethinker and one of the intellectual lights of the town, on the blackened cobblestones of St. Louis’s most disreputable streets, my judgment and balance eroded, vision going, while lazy bluebottles floated between the sweat-beaded tip of my nose and the mounds of horseshit that lay round us like a series of primitive sculptures. All in the cause of humanity.

As the day wore on I began to lose touch with my surroundings. I rose when Cal touched my arm, collapsed like a rump-shot dog when he stopped to interrogate another souse. We walked, talked and drank endlessly. I remember a warehouse full of straw boaters and whalebone corsets, a bowl of chili and a cup of black coffee in a walk-up kitchen, a succession of filthy quays, garbage bins, toothless faces and runny eyes. But no Gloyd. When the sun finally lurched into the hills, Cal took me by the elbow and steered us back to Potter’s.

I was discouraged, disheartened, and thanks to Potter’s home brew, nearly disemboweled. After puking against the side of a carriage and down the front of my shirt, there was only one thing I wanted from life: a bed. Potter (the only thing I remember about him is that he had the most flaccid, pendulous jowls I’d ever seen on man or beast — they looked like nothing so much as buttocks grafted onto his face) led me up the stairs to the dormitory and gave me a gentle shove into the darkened room. “Number Nine,” he said. When my eyes became accustomed to the light I saw that the ranks of wooden bedsteads were painted with white numbers. I started down the row, reeling and reeking, fighting for balance, until I drew up to Number Nine. As I clutched at the bedpost with my left hand and fought to unbutton my shirt with my right, I became aware of a form beneath the horsehair blanket spread across my bunk. Someone was in my bed. This was too much. I began to shake him. “Hey, wake up there, pardner. That’s my bunk you got there. Hey.” It was then that I lost my footing and tumbled atop him.

He came alive like a whorehouse fire, screeching and writhing. “Buggery!” he shrieked. “Murder and sodomy!” The other occupants of the dormitory, jolted awake, began spitting threats and epithets into the darkness. I tried to extract myself but the madman had my head in a vise-grip. His voice was high-pitched and spasmodic, a sow scenting the butcher’s block. “Pederasty!” he bawled.

Suddenly the room blazed with light. It was Potter, wagging his inhuman jowls, a lantern in his hand. Cal stood at his elbow, squinting into the glare. I turned my head. The man who had hold of me was hoary as a goat, yellow-toothed, his eyes like the eggs of some aquatic insect. “Doc!” shouted Cal.

The madman loosened his grip. “Cal?” he said.

McGurk met us at the Topeka station and gave us the lay of the land. A group of them — women in black bonnets, teetotalers and Holy Rollers — were still picketing the office, and in the absence of The Sun had begun an alternative press in the basement of the Baptist church. McGurk showed me a broadside they’d printed. It described me as “a crapulous anarchist,” “a human viper,” and “a lackey of the immoral and illicit business enterprises which prey on the emotionally feeble for the purpose of fiduciary gain.” But a syntactical lashing wasn’t the worst of it. Mrs. Mad had bought off the Sheriff and she and her vigilantes were scouring the town in the name of Jesus Christ, sobriety and abstinence from tobacco, fraternity and Texicano food. She’d evacuated the Moose Lodge and Charlie Trumbull’s Tobacco Emporium, and then her disciples had boarded up the doors. And she’d closed down Pedro Paramo’s eatery because he served fresh-pounded tortillas and refried beans with an order of eggs. It was high time for a showdown.

We threw open the massive oaken door at Doge’s Place, took the boards down from the new plate-glass windows, lit the oil lamps, and hired a one-legged banjo strummer from Arkansas to cook us up some knee-slapping music. Before Cal had finished tracing the big winged D for DOGE’S PLACE on the front window, the saloon was shoulder-deep in drinking men, including a healthy salting of bad characters. That banjo rang and thrilled through the streets like the sweet song of the Sirens. Somebody even fired off a big horse pistol once or twice.

Our secret weapon sat at the bar. His fee was fifty dollars and all he could drink. Doge had donated a bottle of his finest, and I took up a collection for the rest, beginning with a greenback ten out of my own pocket. Gloyd was pretty far gone. He stared into his empty shot glass, mooing her name over and over like a heifer coming into heat. “Carry. Ohhh, Carry.”

It took her half an hour. On the nose. Up the street she came, grim and foreboding, her jackals and henchwomen in tow. I lounged against the doorframe, picking my teeth. The banjo rang in my ears. I could see their heads thrown back as they shrieked out the lyrics of some spiritual or other, and I felt the tremor as their glossy black boots descended on the pavement in unison, tramp, tramp, tramp. Up the street, arms locked, teeth flashing, uvulas aquiver. “He is my refuge and my fortress!” they howled. Tramp, tramp, tramp. She led them up the porch, shoved me aside, and bulled her way in.