T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

When he woke again it was to the beep-beep-beep of the house alarm and to the hazy apprehension of some godawful crash — a jet breaking the sound barrier, the first rumbling clap of the quake he lived in constant fear of — an apprehension that something was amiss, that this beep-beep-beeping, familiar though it seemed, was somehow different, more high-pitched and admonitory than the beep-beep-beeping occasioned by a child going out to cuddle a bunny. He sat up. Hilary rose to her elbows beside him, looking bewildered, and in that instant the alarm was silenced forever by the unmistakable roar of gunblast. Ellis’ heart froze. Hilary cried out, there was the heavy thump of footsteps below, a faint choked whimper as of little girls startled in their sleep and then a strange voice — high, hoarse, and raging — that chewed up the morning like a set of jaws. “Armed response!” the voice howled. “Armed response, goddamnk! Armed response!”

The couple strained forward like mourners at a funeral. Giselle had them, she knew that. They’d looked scared when she came to the door, a pair of timid rabbity faces peering out at her from behind the matching frames of their prescription glasses, and they seated themselves on the edge of the couch as if they were afraid of their own furniture. She had them wringing their hands and darting uneasy glances out the window as she described the perpetrator—“A white man, dressed like a schoolteacher, but with these wicked, jittery eyes that just sent a shiver through you.” She focused on the woman as she described the victims. There was a boy, just fourteen years old, on his way to school, and a woman in a Mercedes driving down to the corner store for coffee filters. And then the family — they must have read about it — all of them, not three blocks from where they were now sitting. “He was thirty-five years old,” she said in a husky voice, “an engineer at Rocketdyne, his whole life ahead of him … arid she, she was one of these supernice people who … and the children …” She couldn’t go on. The man — Mr. Dunsinane, wasn’t that the name? — leaned forward and handed her a Kleenex. Oh, she had them, all right. She could have sold them the super-deluxe laser alert system, stock in the company, mikes for every flower in the garden, but the old charge just wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, fighting back a sob.

It was weird, she thought, pressing the Kleenex to her face, but the masked intruder had never affected her like this, or the knife-sharpening Mexican either. It was Coles, of course, and those sick jumpy eyes of his, but it was the signs too. She couldn’t stop thinking about those signs — if they hadn’t been there, that is, stuck in the lawn like a red flag in front of a bull… But there was no future in that. No, she told the story anyway, told it despite the chill that came over her and the thickening in her throat.

She had to. If only for her peace of mind.

(1987)

In the mail that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100 % Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.

“Ken? What is it?”

Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”

He handed her the letter.

“My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”

It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats — all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession — but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.

“You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”

Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes — some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one — and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were — well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guia-nese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days — for a price, of course — but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies — twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds — and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.

They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.

“No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”

“How old?” Pat said.

Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child — a boy — whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cade-martori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”

The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.

Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average — or above average — intelligence. He’s a boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens — or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.

“Does he behave?” Pat asked.

“Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost.

“Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again — so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow — Ken, Pat — let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents — they were your age, by the way — just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his finger—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony … poor little Tony comes home …”