T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

“Dad? Are you listening?”

Suddenly the lights are blinding him, the jukebox is scalding his ears, and the weariness pressing down on him like a truckload of cement. “Take me home, Berta,” he says.

He wakes to darkness, momentarily disoriented. The dreams have come at him like dark swooping birds, lifting him, taking him back, dropping him in scene after scene of disorder, threat, and sorrow. All of a sudden he’s sunk into the narrow hospital bed in San Bernardino, fifty years back, his head pounding with the ache of concussion, his left leg gone at the knee. What kind of motorcycle was it? the doctor asks. And then he’s in Bud’s Grocery and General Store in Charlottesville, thirteen years old, and he’s got a salami in one hand and a sixty-pound-pull hunting bow in the other and no money, and he’s out the door and running before Bud can even get out from behind the counter. And then finally, in the moment of waking, there’s Ruth, his wife, down on the kitchen floor in a spasm, hurt bad somewhere down in the deep of her. But wait: somehow all of a sudden she’s grown fat, rearranged her features and the color of her hair — somehow she’s transformed herself into the Patio-soda woman. Big, big, big. Thighs like buttermilk. You people , she says.

There’s a persistent thumping in the floorboards, like the beat of a colossal heart, and the occasional snatch of laughter. He hears Ormand’s voice, Jewel’s. Then another he doesn’t recognize. Ormand. Lee Junior. Laughter. Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he swings his legs around and drops heavily into the wheelchair. Then he fumbles for his glasses—1:30, reads the dimly glowing face of the clock — and knocks over the cup with his partial plate in it. He’s wearing his striped pajamas. No need to bother about a bathrobe.

“Hey, Calvin — what’s happening!” Ormand shouts as the old man wheels himself into the living room. Lee Junior and Jewel are sitting side by side on the couch; the Mexican kid — Calvin can never remember his name — is sprawled on the floor smoking a big yellow cigarette, and Ormand is hunched over a bottle of tequila in the easy chair. All three color TVs are on and the hi-fi is scaring up some hellacious caterwauling nonsense that sets his teeth on edge. “Come on in and join the party,” Jewel says, holding up a bottle of Spañada.

For a moment he just sits there blinking at them, his eyes adjusting to the light. The numbers are in his head again — batting averages, disaster tolls, the dimensions of the Grand Coulee Dam — and he doesn’t know what to say. “C’mon, Calvin,” Ormand says, “loosen up.”

He feels ridiculous, humbled by age. Bony as a corpse in the striped pajamas, hair fluffed out like cotton balls pasted to his head, glasses glinting in the lamplight. “Okay,” he murmurs, and Jewel is up off the couch and handing him a paper cup of the sweetened red wine.

“You hear about Rod Chefalo?” the Mexican says.

“No,” says Lee Junior.

“Ormand, you want to put on a movie or something I can watch?” Jewel says. One TV set, the biggest one, shows an auto race, little cars plastered with motor-oil stickers whizzing round a track as if in a children’s game; the other two feature brilliantined young men with guitars.

“Drove that beat Camaro of his up a tree out in the wash.”

“No shit? He wind up in the hospital or what?”

“What do you want to watch, Aunt Jewel? You just name it. I don’t give a shit about any of this.”

After a while, Calvin finds himself drifting. The wine smells like honeydew melons and oranges and tastes like Kool-Aid, but it gives him a nice little burn in the stomach. His daughter’s crazy, he’s thinking as the wine settles into him. These are good people. Nice to sit here with them in the middle of the night instead of being afraid to leave his room, like when he was with those Mexicans, or having some starched-up bitch in the nursing home dousing the lights at eight.

“You know she went to the cops?” Lee Junior’s face is like something you’d catch a glimpse of behind a fence.

“The cops?” The Mexican kid darts his black eyes round the room, as if he expects the sheriff to pop up from behind the couch. “What do you mean, she went to the cops?”

“They can’t do a thing,” Ormand cuts in. “Not without a search warrant.”

“That’s right.” Lee Junior reaches for his can of no-name beer, belching softly and thumping a fist against his sternum. “And to get one they need witnesses. And I tell you, any of these shitheels on this block come up against me, they’re going to regret it. Don’t think they don’t know it either.”

“That fat-assed Kraut,” Ormand says, but he breaks into a grin, and then he’s laughing. Lee Junior joins him and the Mexican kid makes some sort of wisecrack, but Calvin misses it. Jewel, her face noncommittal, gets up to change the channel.

“You know what I’m thinkin’?” Ormand says, grinning still. Jewel’s back is turned, and Calvin can see the flicker of green and pink under her right arm as she flips through the channels on the big TV. Lee Junior leans forward and the Mexican kid waves the smoke out of his eyes and props himself up on one elbow, a cautious little smile creeping into the lower part of his face. “What?” the Mexican kid says.

Calvin isn’t there, he doesn’t exist, the cardboard cup is as insubstantial as an eggshell in his splotched and veiny hand as he lifts it, trembling, to his lips.

“I’m thinking maybe she could use another lesson.”

In the morning, early, Calvin is awakened by the crackle and stutter of a shortwave radio. His throat is dry and his head aches, three cups of wine gone sour in his mouth and leaden on his belly. With an effort, he pushes himself up and slips on his glasses. The noise seems to be coming from outside the house — static like a storm in the desert, tinny voices all chopped and diced. He parts the curtains.

A police cruiser sits at the curb, engine running, driver’s door swung open wide. Craning his neck, Calvin can get a fix on the porch and the figures of Ormand — bare chest and bare feet — and a patrolman in the uniform of the LAPD. “So what’s this all aboutP” Ormand is saying.

The officer glances down at the toes of his boots, then looks up and holds Ormand’s gaze. “A break-in last night at the European Deli around the corner, 2751 Commerce Avenue. The proprietor”—and here he pauses to consult the metal-bound notepad in his hand—“a Mrs. Eva Henckle, thinks that you may have some information for us….”

Ormand’s hair is in disarray; his cheeks are dark with stubble. “No, Officer,” he says, rubbing a hand over his stomach. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t hear a thing. What time was that, did you say?”

The patrolman is young, no more than two or three years older than Ormand. In fact, he looks a bit like Ormand — if Ormand were to lose thirty pounds, stand up straight, get himself a shave, and cut the dark scraggly hair that trails down his back like something stripped from an animal. Ignoring the question, the patrolman produces a stub of pencil and asks one of his own. “You live here with your aunt, is that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a brother, Leland Orem, Junior — is that right?”

“That’s right,” Ormand says. “And like I said, we were all in last night and didn’t hear a thing.”

“Mother deceased?”

“Yeah.”

“And your father?”

“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Ormand’s expression has gone nasty suddenly, as if he’s bitten into something rotten.

For a moment, the patrolman is silent, and Calvin becomes aware of the radio again: the hiss of static, and a bored, disembodied voice responding to a second voice, equally bored and disembodied. “Do you know a Jaime Luis Torres?” the patrolman asks.