T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The guy was crazy. Creepy. Sick. He’d kept her there over four hours, and he had no intention of buying anything — she could see that in the first fifteen minutes. He just wanted an audience. Somebody to rant at, to threaten, to pin down with those jittery blue eyes. Richard had wanted her to go to the police, but she balked. What had he done, really? Scared her, yes. Bruised her arm. But what could the police do — she’d gone there of her own free will.

Her own free will. He’d said that. Those were his exact words.

Indignant, maybe a little shaken, she’d got up from the kitchen table to stuff her papers back into the briefcase. He was cursing under his breath, muttering darkly about the idiots on the freeway in their big-ass Mercedeses, crowding him, about spics and niggers and junior-high kids cutting through his yard—“Free country, my ass!” he’d shouted suddenly. “Free for every punk and weirdo and greaser to crap all over what little bit I got left, but let me get up from this table and put a couple holes in one of the little peckerheads and we’ll see how it is. And I suppose you’re going to protect me, huh, Miss Mercedes Benz with your heels and stockings and your big high-tech alarm system, huh?”

When she snapped the briefcase closed — no sale, nothing, just get me out of here, she was thinking — that was when he grabbed her arm. “Sit down,” he snarled, and she tried to shake free but couldn’t, he was strong with the rage of the psychopath, the lion in its den, the loony up against the wall.

“You’re hurting me,” she said as he forced her back down. “Mr…. Coles!” and she heard her own voice jump with anger, fright, pain.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, tightening his grip, “but you came here of your own free will, didn’t you? Thought you were going to sucker me, huh? Run me a song and dance and lay your high-tech crap and your big bad SecureCo guards on me — oh, I’ve seen them, bunch of titsuckers and college wimps, who they going to stop? Huh?” He dropped her arm and challenged her with his jumpy mad tight-jawed glare.

She tried to get up but he roared, “Sit down! We got business here, goddamnit!” And then he was calling for his wife: “Glenys! Woman! Get your ass in here.”

If she’d expected anything from the wife, any help or melioration, Giselle could see at a glance just how hopeless it was. The woman wouldn’t look at her. She appeared in the doorway, pale as death, her hands trembling, staring at the carpet like a whipped dog. “Two G&T’s,” Coles said, sucking in his breath as if he were on the very edge of something, at the very beginning, “tall with a wedge of lime.”

“But—” Giselle began to protest, looking from Coles to the woman.

“You’ll drink with me, all right.” Coles’ voice came at her like a blade of ice. “Get friendly, huh? Show me what you got.” And then he turned away, his face violent with disgust. “SecureCo,” he spat. He looked up, staring past her. “You going to keep the sons of bitches away from me, you going to keep them off my back, you going to give me any guarantees?” His voice rose. “I got a gun collection worth twelve thousand dollars in there — you going to answer for that? For my color TV? The goddamned trash can even?”

Giselle sat rigid, wondering if she could make a break for the back door and wondering if he was the type to keep it locked.

“Sell me,” he demanded, looking at her now.

The woman set down the gin-and tonics and then faded back into the shadows of the hallway. Giselle said nothing.

“Tell me about the man in the mask,” he said, grinning again, grinning wide, too wide, “tell me about those poor old retired people. Come on,” he said, his eyes taunting her, “sell me. I want it. I do. I mean I really need you people and your high-tech bullshit….”

He held her eyes, gulped half his drink, and set the glass down again. “I mean really,” he said. “For my peace of mind.”

It wasn’t the fender-bender on the freeway the night before or the two hundred illegals lined up and looking for work on Canoga Avenue at dawn, and it wasn’t the heart-clenching hate he still felt after being forced into early retirement two years ago or the fact that he’d sat up all night drinking gin while Glenys slept and the police and insurance companies filed their reports — it wasn’t any of that that finally drove Everett Coles over the line. Not that he’d admit, anyway. It wasn’t that little whore from SecureCo either (that’s what she was, a whore, selling her tits and her lips and her ankles and all the rest of it too) or the veiny old hag from Westec or even the self-satisfied, smirking son of a bitch from Metropolitan Life, though he’d felt himself slipping on that one (“Death and dismemberment!” he’d hooted in the man’s face, so thoroughly irritated, rubbed wrong, and just plain pissed he could think of nothing but the big glistening Mannlicher on the wall in the den) … No, it was Rance Ruby’s stupid, fat-faced, shit-licking excuse of a kid.

Picture him sitting there in the first faint glow of early morning, the bottle mostly gone now and the fire in his guts over that moron with the barking face who’d run into him on the freeway just about put out, and then he looks up from the kitchen table and what does he see but this sorry lardassed spawn of a sorry tattooed beer-swilling lardass of a father cutting through the yard with his black death’s-head T-shirt and his looseleaf and book jackets, and that’s it. There’s no more thinking, no more reason, no insurance or hope. He’s up out of the chair like a shot and into the den, and then he’s punching the barrel of the Mannlicher right through the glass of the den window. The fat little fuck, he’s out there under the grapefruit tree, shirttail hanging out, turning at the sound, and then ka-boom , there’s about half of him left.

Next minute Everett Coles is in his car, fender rubbing against the tire in back where that sorry sack of shit ran into him, and slamming out of the driveway. He’s got the Mannlicher on the seat beside him and a couple fistfuls of ammunition and he’s peppering the side of Ruby’s turd-colored house with a blast from his Weatherby pump-action shotgun. He grazes a parked camper on his way up the block, slams over a couple of garbage cans, and leans out the window to take the head off somebody’s yapping poodle as he careens out onto the boulevard, every wire gone loose in his head.

Ellis Hunsicker woke early. He’d dreamt he was a little cloud — the little cloud of the bedtime story he’d read Mifty and Corinne the night before — scudding along in the vast blue sky, free and untethered, the sun smiling on him as it does in picturebooks, when all at once he’d felt himself swept irresistibly forward, moving faster and faster, caught up in a huge, darkening, malevolent thunderhead that rose up faceless from the far side of the day … and then he woke. It was just first light. Hilary was breathing gently beside him. The alarm panel glowed soothingly in the shadow of the half-open door.

It was funny how quickly he’d got used to the thing, he reflected, yawning and scratching himself there in the muted light. A week ago he’d made a fool of himself over it in front of Sid and Tina, and now it was just another appliance, no more threatening or unusual — and no less vital — than the microwave, the Cuisinart, or the clock radio. The last two mornings, in fact, he’d been awakened not by the clock radio but by the insistent beeping of the house alarm — Mifty had set it off going out the back door to cuddle her rabbit. He thought now of getting up to shut the thing off — it was an hour yet before he’d have to be up for work — but he didn’t. The bed was warm, the birds had begun to whisper outside, and he shut his eyes, drifting off like a little cloud.