T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Suddenly the place fell silent. The banjo choked off, yahoos and yip-hays were swallowed, chatter died. She raised her arm and the chorus swept up the scale to finish on a raging high C, pious and combative. Then she went into her act, snorting and stamping round the room till her wire-rimmed spectacles began to mist up with emotion. “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep!” she roared. “Howl, all ye drinkers of wine, for strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.” She was towering, swollen, red-faced, awesome as a twister roaring up out of the southwest. We were stunned silent — Cal, Doge, McGurk, Pedro — all of us. But then, from the rear of the crowd, all the long way down the far end of the bar, came the low moan of ungulate distress. “Carrrrry, ohhhh baby, what have I done to you?”

The look on her face at that moment could have constituted a criminal act in itself. She was hideous. There was a scuffle of chairs and feet as we cleared out of her way, every man for himself. Doge ducked down behind the bar, Cal and McGurk sought refuge back of an overturned table, the bad characters made themselves scarce, and suddenly there were just the two of them — Mrs. Mad and Gloyd — staring into each other’s eyes across the vacant expanse of the barroom. Gloyd got down off the bar stool and started toward her, his gait shuffling and unsteady, his arms spread in a vague empty embrace. Suddenly the hatchet appeared in her hand, legerdemain, her knuckles clenched white round the handle. She was breathing like a locomotive, he was calm as comatose. She started toward him.

When they got within two yards of one another they stopped. Gloyd tottered, swaying on his feet, a lock of yellowed hair catching in his eye socket. “Carry,” he said, his voice rough and guttural. “Honey, peachblossom, come back to me, come back to your old Doc.” And then he winked at her.

She flushed red, but then got hold of herself and came back at him with the Big Book: “At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”

He looked deep into her eyes, randy as an old coyote. “I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome.” He was grinning. He raised his arms to embrace her and suddenly she lashed out at him with the hatchet, the arc and the savage swish of it as it sliced the air, missing him by a clean two feet or more. “Carry,” he said, his voice sad and admonishing. “Let bygones be bygones, honey, and come on back to your old Doc.” Her arm fell, the hatchet dropped to the floor. She hung her head. And then, just a whisper at first, he began crooning in a rusty old voice, soft and sad, quavering like a broken heart:

The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox ,

Nor so loudly to blow his horn ,

And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pot ,

Without a little barleycorn.

When he finished we stood there silent — the women in black, the bad characters, Doge, Cal, McGurk and me — as though we’d just watched the big brocaded curtain fall across the stage of Tyler’s Playhouse in Kansas City. And then suddenly she fell to her knees sobbing — wailing and clucking in the back of her throat till I couldn’t tell if it was laughing or crying. Her sobs, like her fulminations, were thunderous — they filled the room, shook the rafters. I began to feel embarrassed. But the Doc, he just stood over her, hands on his hips, grinning, until one of the women — it was Lucy McGurk — helped her from the room.

The faces of her retinue were pale as death against their black bonnets and choirboy collars. No longer the core of a moral cyclone, they were just towns-women, teetotalers and pansies. We jeered like the bad characters we were, and they turned tail and ran.

A month later a wagon rumbled up Warsaw Street from the station with Doge’s new mahogany bar counter in back. McGurk and I took the afternoon off to sit in the cool dusk of Doge’s Place and watch Doge and Cal nail it down and put the first coat of wax on it. The new Vivian DeLorbe, a bit rippled, but right in the right spots, hung proudly, and a sort of mosaic mirror — made up of pieces salvaged from the original and set in plaster — cast its submarine reflections round the room. We had a couple of whiskeys, and then Doge mentioned he’d heard Mrs. Mad was back at it again, parching all the good citizens down in Wichita. Cal and I laughed, but poor John didn’t take it so well, seeing that Lucy had left him to go off with her and join the movement.

Cal shook his head. “These women,” he said. “There’s no stoppin ‘em. Next thing you know they’ll be wantin the vote.”

(1977)

They sent a hit squad after the bear. Three guys in white parkas with National Forestry Service patches on the shoulders. It was late Friday afternoon, about a week before Christmas, the snow was coming down so fast it seemed as if the sky and earth were glued together, and Jill had just opened up the lodge for drinks and dinner when they stamped in through the door. The tall one — he ordered shots of Jim Beam and beers for all of them — could have been a bear himself, hunched under the weight of his shoulders in the big quilted parka, his face lost in a bristle of black beard, something feral and challenging in the clash of his blue eyes. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said, looking Jill full in the face as he swung a leg over the barstool and pressed his forearms to the gleaming copper rail. “I hear you got a bear problem.”

I was sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar, nursing a beer and watching the snow. Jill hadn’t turned up the lights yet and I was glad — the place had a soothing underwater look to it, snow like a sheet stretched tight over the window, the fire in the corner gentle as a backrub. I was alive and moving — lighting a cigarette, lifting the glass to my lips — but I felt so peaceful I could have been dozing.

“That’s right,” Jill said, still flushing from the “pretty lady” remark. Two weeks earlier, in bed, she’d told me she hadn’t felt pretty in years. What are you talking about? I’d said. She dropped her lower lip and looked away. I gained twenty pounds, she said. I reached out to touch her, smiling, as if to say twenty pounds — what’s twenty pounds? Little Ball of Suet, I said, referring to one of the Maupassant stories in the book she’d given me. It’s not funny, she said, but then she’d rolled over and touched me back.

“Name’s Boo,” the big man said, pausing to throw back his bourbon and take a sip of beer. “This is Scott,” nodding at the guy on his left, also in beard and watchcap, “and Josh.” Josh, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, appeared on his right like a jack-in-the-box. Boo unzipped the parka to expose a thermal shirt the color of dried blood.

“Is this all together?” Jill asked.

Boo nodded, and I noticed the scar along the ridge of his cheekbone, thinking of churchkey openers, paring knives, the long hooked ivory claws of bears. Then he turned to me. “What you drinking, friend?”

I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen — the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery — and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course — the road was closed half the time in winter anyway — but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.