T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

I felt bad. I felt like a dog, a sinner, a homewrecker, and a Lothario. I felt like Fred must have felt. Naked, in the dark, I poured myself another drink and watched Cindy’s house for movement. There was none. A minute later I was asleep.

I woke early. My throat was dry and my head throbbed. I slipped into a pair of running shorts I found in the clutter on the floor, brushed my teeth, rinsed my face, and contemplated the toilet for a long while, trying to gauge whether or not I was going to vomit.

Half a dozen aspirin and three glasses of water later, I stepped gingerly down the stairs. I was thinking poached eggs and dry toast — and maybe, if I could take it, half a cup of coffee — when I drifted into the living room and saw her huddled there on the couch. Her eyed were red, her makeup smeared, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. Beside her, wrapped in a pink blanket the size of a bath towel, was the baby.

“Cindy?”

She shoved the hair back from her face and narrowed her eyes, studying me. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she murmured.

“You mean, he—?”

I should have held her, I guess, should have probed deep in my counselor’s lexicon for words of comfort and assurance, but I couldn’t. Conflicting thoughts were running through my head, acid rose in my throat, and the baby, conscious for the first time since I’d laid eyes on it, was fixing me with a steady, unblinking gaze of accusation. This wasn’t what I’d wanted, not at all.

“Listen,” I said, “can I get you anything — a cup of coffee or some cereal or something? Milk for the baby?”

She shook her head and began to make small sounds of grief and anguish. She bit her lip and averted her face.

I felt like a criminal. “God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—” I started for her, hoping she’d raise her tear-stained face to me, tell me it wasn’t my fault, rise bravely from the couch, and trudge off across the lawn and out of my life.

At that moment there was a knock at the door. We both froze. It came again, louder, booming, the sound of rage and impatience. I crossed the room, swung open the door, and found Joey on the doorstep. He was pale, and his hair was in disarray. When the door pulled back, his eyes locked on mine with a look of hatred and contempt. I made no move to open the storm door that separated us.

“You want her?” he said, and he ground the toe of his boot into the welcome mat like a ram pawing the earth before it charges.

I had six inches and forty pounds on him; I could have shoved through the door and drowned my guilt in blood. But it wasn’t Joey I wanted to hurt, it was Fred. Or, no, down deep, at the root of it all, it was Judy I wanted to hurt. I glanced into his eyes through the flimsy mesh of the screen and then looked away.

“‘Cause you can have her,” he went on, dropping the Nashville twang and reverting to pure Brooklynese. “She’s a whore. I don’t need no whore. Shit,” he spat, looking beyond me to where she sat huddled on the couch with the baby, “Elvis went through a hundred just like her. A thousand.”

Cindy was staring at the floor. I had nothing to say.

“Fuck you both,” he said finally, then turned and marched across the lawn. I watched him slam into the van, fire up the engine, and back out of the driveway. Then the boy who dared to rock was gone.

I looked at Cindy. Her knees were drawn up under her chin and she was crying softly. I knew I should comfort her, tell her it would be all right and that everything would work out fine. But I didn’t. This was no pregnant fifteen-year-old who hated her mother or a kid who skipped cheerleading practice to smoke pot and hang out at the video arcade — this wasn’t a problem that would walk out of my office and go home by itself. No, the problem was at my doorstep, here on my couch: I was involved — I was responsible — and I wanted no part of it.

“Patrick,” she stammered finally. “I–I don’t know what to say. I mean”—and here she was on the verge of tears again—“I feel as if… as if—”

I didn’t get to hear how she felt. Not then, anyway. Because at that moment the phone began to ring. From upstairs, in the bedroom. Cindy paused in mid-phrase; I froze. The phone rang twice, three times. We looked at each other. On the fourth ring I turned and bounded up the stairs.

“Hello?”

“Pat, listen to me.” It was Judy. She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. “Now don’t hang up. Please.”

The blood was beating in my head. The receiver weighed six tons. I struggled to hold it to my ear.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “I know it. Fred’s a jerk. I left him three days ago in some winery in St. Helena.” There was a pause. “I’m down in Monterey now and I’m lonely. I miss you.”

I held my breath.

“Pat?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m coming home, okay?”

I thought of Joey, of Cindy downstairs with her baby. I glanced out the window at the place next door, vacant once again, and thought of Henry and Irma and the progress of the years. And then I felt something give way, as if a spell had been broken.

“Okay,” I said.

They come like apocalypse, like all ten plagues rolled in one, beating across the sky with an insidious drone, their voices harsh and metallic, cursing the land. Ten million strong, a flock that blots out the huge pale sinking sun, they descend into the trees with a protracted explosion of wings, black underfeathers swirling down like a corrupt snow. At dawn they vacate the little grove of oak and red cedar in a streaming rush, heading west to disperse and feed in the freshly seeded fields; at dusk they gather like storm clouds to swarm back to their roost. Ten million birds, concentrated in a stand of trees no bigger around than a city block — each limb, each branch, each twig and bole and strip of bark bowed under the weight of their serried bodies — ten million tiny cardiovascular systems generating a sirocco of heat, ten million digestive tracts processing seeds, nuts, berries, animal feed, and streaking the tree trunks with chalky excrement. Where before there had been leafspill, lichened rocks, sunlit paths beneath the trees, now there are foot-deep carpets of bird shit.

“We got a problem, Mai.” Egon Scharf stands at the window, turning a worn paperback over in his hand. Outside, less than a hundred feet off, ten million starlings squat in the trees, cursing one another in a cacophony of shrieks, whistles, and harsh check -checks. “Says here,” holding up the book, “the damn birds carry disease.”

A muted undercurrent of sound buzzes through the house like static, a wheezing, whistling, many-throated hiss. Mai looks up from her crocheting: “What? I can’t hear you.”

“Disease!” he shouts, flinging the book down. “Stink, fungus, rot. I say we got to do something.”

“Tut,” is all she says. Her husband has always been an alarmist, from the day Jack Kennedy was shot and he installed bulletproof windows in the Rambler, to the time he found a single tent-caterpillar nest in the cherry tree and set fire to half the orchard. “A flock of birds, Egon, that’s all — just a flock of birds.”

For a moment he is struck dumb with rage and incomprehension, a lock of stained white hair caught against the bridge of his nose. “Just a flock—? Do you know what you’re saying? There’s millions of them out there, crapping all over everything. The drains are stopped up, it’s like somebody whitewashed the car — I nearly broke my neck slipping in wet bird shit right on my own front porch, for Christ’s sake — and you say it’s nothing to worry about? Just a flock of birds?”