T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Ormand hesitates, shuffling his feet on the weathered boards a minute before answering. His voice is small. “Yes,” he says.

“Have you seen him recently?”

“No,” Ormand lies. His voice is a whisper.

“What was that?”

“I said no.”

There is another pause, the patrolman looking into Ormand’s s eyes, Ormand looking back. “Mrs. Henckle’s place has been burglarized four times in the last three months. She thinks you and your brother might be responsible. What do you say?

“I say she’s crazy.” Ormand’s face is big with indignation. The officer says nothing. “She’s had it in for us ever since we were in junior high and she says Lee took a bottle of beer out of the cooler — which he never did. She’s just a crazy bitch and we never had anythin’ to do with her. ”

The patrolman seems to mull over this information a moment, thoughtfully stroking the neat clipped crescent of his mustache. Then he says, “She claims she’s seen you and your brother out here on the porch drinking types of German beer and soda you can’t get anywhere else around here — except at her place.”

“Yeah?” Ormand snarls. “And what does that prove? You want to know, I bought that stuff in downtown L.A.”

“Where?”

“This place I know, I’m not sure of the street, but I could drive you right to it, no sweat. She’s just crazy, is all. She don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Okay, Ormand,” the officer says, snapping shut his notepad,

“I’ve got it all down here. Mind if I step inside a minute and look around?”

“You got a search warrant?”

It’s a long morning. Calvin sits up in bed, trying to read an article in The Senior Citizen about looking and feeling younger—“Get Out and Dance!” the headline admonishes — but he has trouble concentrating. The house is preternaturally quiet. Ormand and Lee Junior, who rarely rise before noon, slammed out the door half an hour after the patrolman left, and they haven’t been back since. Jewel is asleep. Calvin can hear the harsh ratcheting snores from her room up the hall.

The thing that motivates him to pull on a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare khaki pants and lower himself into the wheelchair is hunger — or at least that’s what he tells himself. Most times when Jewel overindulges her taste for red wine and sleeps through the morning, Calvin stays put until he hears her moving about in the kitchen, but today is different. It’s not just that he’s feeling out of sorts physically, the cheap wine having scoured his digestive tract as relentlessly as a dose of the cathartic his mother used to give him when he had worms as a boy, but he’s disturbed by the events of the preceding night and early morning as well. “She could use another lesson,” Ormand had said, and then, first thing in the morning, the patrolman had shown up. Down deep, deeper even than the lowest stratum of excuses and denials he can dredge up, Calvin knows it’s no coincidence.

The wheels rotate under his hands as he moves out into the hallway and eases past Jewel’s room. He can see her through the half-open door, still in her dress and sneakers, her head buried in a litter of bedclothes. Next door is the bathroom — he been in there three times already — and then, on the left, the kitchen. He rolls off the carpet and onto the smooth, spattered linoleum, gliding now, pulling right to skirt an overturned bag of garbage, and wheeling up to the sink for a sip of water.

The place is a mess. Unwashed cups, glasses, plates, and silver-ware litter the counter, and beer bottles too — the black ones. A jar of peanut butter stands open on the kitchen table, attracting flies. There’s a smear of something on the wall, the wastebasket hasn’t been emptied in a week, and the room reeks of sick-sweet decay. Calvin gulps a swallow or two of water from a cup scored with black rings. Eleven A.M. and hot already. He can feel the sweat where the glasses lie flat against his temples as he glides over to the refrigerator and swings back the door.

He’d been hoping for a leftover hamburger or a hard-boiled egg, but he isn’t ready for this: the thing is packed, top to bottom, with cold cuts, big blocks of cheese, bratwurst and Tiroler. Käse, reads the label on a wedge of white cheese, Product of Germany. Tilsiter , reads another. Schmelzkäse, Mainauer , Westfalischer Schinken. For a long moment Calvin merely sits there, the cold air in his face, the meats and blocks of cheese wrapped in white butcher’s paper stacked up taller than his head. Somehow, he doesn’t feel hungry any more. And then it hits him: something like anger, something like fear.

The refrigerator door closes behind him with an airtight hiss, flies scatter, an overturned cup on the floor spins wildly away from his right wheel, and he’s back in the hallway again, but this time he’s turning left, into the living room. Bottles, ashtrays, crumpled newspapers, he ignores them all. On the far side of the room stands a cheap plywood door, a door he’s never been through: the door to Ormand and Lee Junior’s room. Sitting there evenings, watching TV, he’s caught a glimpse of the cluttered gloom beyond the doorway as one or the other of the boys slams in or out, but that’s about it. They’ve never invited him in, and he’s never much cared. But now, without hesitation, he wheels himself across the room, shoves down on the door latch with the heel of his hand, and pushes his way in.

He’s no fool. He knew what he would find. But still, the magnitude of it chokes up his throat and makes the blood beat in his head like a big bass drum. From one end of the room to the other, stacked up to the ceiling as if the place were a warehouse or something, are stereo sets, radios, TVs, power tools, toaster ovens, and half a dozen things Calvin doesn’t even recognize except to know that they cost an arm and a leg. In one corner are cases of beer — and, yes, Patio soda — and in the other, beneath a pair of huge PA speakers, guns. Shotguns, rifles, semiautomatics, a sack full of handguns with pearly and nickel-plated grips spilled on the floor like treasure. He can’t believe it. Or no, worse, he can. Shaken, he backs out of the room and pulls the door shut.

The house is silent as a tomb. But wait: is that Jewel? Calvin’s s underarms are soaked through, a bead of sweat drops from his nose. The house stirs itself, floorboards creak of their own accord, the refrigerator starts up with a sigh. Is that Ormand? No, there: he can hear Jewel’s snores again, stutter and wheeze, faint as the hum of the flies. This is his chance: he knows what he must do.

Outside, the sun hits him like a slap in the face. Already his shoulder sockets are on fire and the cast feels like an anchor twisted round his arm. For an instant he sits there beside the door as if debating with himself, the watery old eyes scanning the street for Ormand’s pickup. Then all at once he’s in motion, rocking across the loose floorboards, past the mounds of debris and down the ramp Ormand fixed up for him at the back end of the porch. Below, the ground is littered with tires and machine parts, with rags and branches and refuse, and almost immediately he finds himself hung up on something — part of an auto transmission, it looks like — but he leans over to wrestle with it, heart in his throat, fingers clawing at grease and metal, until he frees himself. Then he’s out the ramshackle gate and into the street.

It’s not much of a hill — a five-degree grade maybe, and fifty or sixty yards up — but to the old man it seems like Everest. So hot, his seat stuck to the chair with his own wetness, salt sweat stinging his eyes, arms pumping and elbows stabbing, on he goes. A station wagon full of kids thunders by him, and then one of those little beetle cars; up ahead, at the intersection of Tully and Commerce, he can see a man on a bicycle waiting for the light to change. Up, up, up, he chants to himself, everything clear, not a number in his head, the good and bad of his life laid out before him like an EKG chart. The next thing he knows, the hill begins to even off and he’s negotiating the sidewalk and turning the corner into the merciful shade of the store fronts. It’s almost a shock when he looks up and finds himself staring numbly at his gaunt, wild-haired image in the dark window of Eva’s European Deli.