Authors: T.C. Boyle
Amber light, red. Jerpbak’s patrol car stood at the curb, engine running, rack lights flashing. At first glance the car seemed empty, and I was shuffling toward the Toyota, thinking only to get out of there before Jerpbak turned his mind to other matters, when I was arrested by the pale glimmer of a face floating in the obscurity of the back-seat window. I saw the glint of an earring, the turned-up collar of a sad leather jacket like the one the kid had been wearing, a pair of pinned mournful eyes. I came closer. Behind the stark wire mesh of that back-seat prison I knew only too well, a second kid sat, the desolation of his face punctuated by the sickle-shaped bruise under his right eye. I stared at him. His tongue flicked out to lick a split lip, the radio crackled, the engine stuttered and then caught again. He was a tough guy, this kid, sixteen years old. He looked as if he’d been crying.
When I stuck my head in the open driver’s window, I saw that the kid was handcuffed to the mesh. He said nothing. I said nothing. I reached in, twisted the ignition key and killed the engine. Then, the keys rattling in my hand like swords, like the fierce, sharp, stabbing edge of righteousness, I cocked my arm and pitched the wheeling clatter of them into the flat black envelope of the night.
The Toyota drove itself. Down the ruptured drive and out onto the dark highway, the nasal blast of the exhaust setting shaded windows atremble, each shove of the gearshift rending the car’s
guts anew: I didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not yet. I didn’t want to look into Gesh’s drained and soot-blackened face, didn’t want to contemplate the razed shed, charred stubble, the big greedy bite the passing jaws had taken out of our lives. It was just past five. My conscious mind had shut down, but something deeper, some root calibrator of need, led me into the macadam parking lot outside the Circle K and on up to the dimly glowing phone booth that stood before it like a shrine: I suddenly knew what I was going to do.
I fished through my wallet for the number, relayed the information to the operator in a voice so low she had to ask me to repeat myself, and listened to the suspenseful rhythms of longdistance connection—
tap-a-tap-clicketa-click-click-click
—as I cupped the receiver in my bandaged hands. It would be eight o’clock in New York.
When at long last the line engaged—with a final, definitive and climactic click—my voice leapt into the void on the other end: “Hello?” I demanded. “Hello?”
I got a recording: the number had been changed. I traced a pattern in the grime of the window as the operator dialed the new number and together we waited for the mice to stop running up and down the line. There was a distant ringing. Three thousand miles away Dwight lifted the receiver.
“Hello, Dwight?” I blurted, barely able to contain myself through the operator’s preliminaries, “it’s me, Felix.” The words came in spate, I couldn’t get them out quickly enough: I was afraid he’d left for work already, was he okay, we’d had an accident. Yes, Phil. In the hospital. Burns. I was all right, yes, just a bit shaken up.
He mumbled something about a weird coincidence. I asked him to read me something, anything, pick a day. How about this date in ’65, I said. I’m upset, I said. Help me. Read me something. Be late for work.
There was something wrong. His voice was strange, and for an instant I thought I’d somehow got the wrong number. “Dwight?” I said.
“It’s a weird coincidence.” He was repeating himself. “I mean that you guys …”
I couldn’t hear him. He was speaking so softly I couldn’t make
out what he was saying. “Dwight,” I shouted, “I can’t hear you. What’s the matter?”
“The fire,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But we’re all right. We made it. I’m picking up Phil tomorrow.”
“No,” he said.
“Read me something.”
“I can’t. I’m talking about my fire, in the apartment. My old apartment.”
It was then that I began to understand, then that I slipped out of myself for a moment, then that I shut up and listened. Dwight’s building had gone up while he was at work. Two weeks ago. He’d lost everything, every record he’d ever kept, every note, every figure, every last fragment of the past. It was as if he’d never lived. “I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Believe it.” His voice was choked. bewildered. “I’ve been trying to remember,” he said. “For two weeks I haven’t been in to work—all I’m doing is trying to reconstruct it all, trying to get
something
down on paper anyway.”
I looked out at the night through the streaked grid of the booth’s window—
Al & Jolene, Suck This, Go Wolverines
—and saw the nodding head of the all-night clerk in the frantically lit quick-stop store. Open all night. Got everything you want. Milk, razor blades, whiskey, Kaopectate. It was a clean, well-lighted place.
“Remember Mrs. Gold? Third grade? It was me, Bobbie Bartro and Linda Lurlee in the far row up against the map of the Fertile Crescent, remember? And you sat where—two rows over, right? Behind Wayne Moore. But what I can’t remember is where Phil sat … or the name of the girl with the braids and buck teeth—Nancy something—that moved away in the fifth grade.”
His voice was a plaint, a drone, remembrance of things past and funeral oration wrapped in one: I didn’t want to hear it. “Dwight,” I said. “Dwight.”
“I’m getting senile. Really, I mean it. Like that game in Little League when we were twelve—we were the Condors, remember? We were playing the Crows, or was it the Orioles? Anyway, Murray Praeger got knocked unconscious in a rundown with somebody, remember? I can get that much. But it’s incredible.
I’m really losing my grip: I can’t remember whether we won or lost—”
“Dwight,” I said. And then I hung up.
I felt as if someone had taken a vegetable peeler to my nerves. Hands wrapped in gauze, face smudged, clothes in a bum’s disarray, I stood there in the phone booth like a postulant, staring at the inert receiver as if I expected it to come alive, as if I somehow expected Dwight to call back and tell me he’d only been joking. After a while a pickup truck wheeled into the lot and two men in long-billed caps and coveralls emerged and ambled into the store, where the somnolent clerk served them coffee in paper cups. It wasn’t getting any earlier.
I fell into the Toyota like a dead man, animated the engine, flicked on the lights. Exhaust rose through the floorboards, the truncated tailpipe rattled furiously against the rear bumper. Three pale faces stared out at me from the blazing sanctuary of the quick-stop store as I backed around, slammed the car into gear and shot out onto the highway with a squalling blast. Suddenly I felt crazy, fey, psychopathic. Come and get me, Jerpbak, I thought, popping the clutch and fishtailing up the road. I got it up to seventy by the time I reached the town limits, then swung around and roared through the sleepy hamlet again. I was baiting the Fates, measuring the gape of the jaws. Nothing happened.
I found after a while that I’d somehow turned off the main drag, negotiated a tricky series of cross streets and emerged on the broad, tree-lined corridor of Oak Street. Now I was creeping, the exhaust a muted rumble. My hands were on the wheel, my foot on the accelerator, but the car rolled forward under its own volition, no arguing with destiny. Houses drifted past, white shutters, picket fences, shade trees, then a block of storefronts. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Red-veined and sorrowful, the eyes fell back into my skull like open sores. I swiped at a black smear on my nose, tried to pat my hair in place. The headlights were tentacles pulling me along.
The shop was dark. I found the stairway out back. White railing, ghostly. Potted plants, leaves black and smooth to the touch, lovesick cat off in the bushes, smell of rosemary or basil.
I stumbled on the first step, floundering in the darkness like a dog-paddler gone off the deep end; something crashed to the ground with a sick thump. I kept going. I didn’t think, didn’t want to think.
A moment later I stood on the second-floor landing, breathing hard and peering off into the abyss below. More plants. I turned to the door, knuckles poised, not thinking, not thinking, and made sudden cranial contact with what must have been a bowling ball suspended at eye level. It hit me once, hard, just above the bridge of the nose, then swung off into space to come back and crack me again, this time on the crown of my bowed head. All at once I felt desperate. I’d meant to knock deferentially—it was past five in the morning, after all—or at least wittily, but I found myself hammering at the door like the Gestapo.
Boom, boom, boom.
From inside I could hear confused movement: shuffling feet, probing hands. A light went on, a voice called out.
Boom, boom, boom
, I hammered. Then the porch light, mustard yellow. A hanging planter materialized, reeling past my left ear; a ceramic dwarf looked up at me quizzically. “Okay, okay,” came the voice from within, “enough already.” I stopped pounding. There was the sound of lock and key, a bolt sliding back.
I spread my bandaged hands, lifted my shoulders in a deprecatory shrug: I was ready to capitulate.
Petra stood in the doorway, her face soft with sleep, a dragon-splashed kimono pinched round her throat. There was a look of utter stupefaction in her eyes, a look of bewilderment and incomprehension, as if she’d been wakened from a sound sleep and asked to name the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics or the capitals of all the countries of the South China Sea, beginning with Borneo. A square-headed cat brushed up against her bare ankles and then froze, blinking up at me mistrustfully.
I’d twisted my face into a strained grin and fixed it there until I must have looked like a funeral-home director in a novelty shop. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I grinned wider.
“Felix?” she said. It was a question.
I nodded.
This exchange was succeeded by an ever-lengthening moment of silence, during which I struggled to think of some witty opener, the mot that would break the ice and precipitate a mutual flood of verbal good will, while Petra’s look went from puzzlement to a glare of irate recognition. She was studying my sorry hair, soiled face, scorched clothes and mummy-wrapped hands, recalling no doubt that the last time she’d laid eyes on me my behavior had been eccentric to the point of offense, and that our only communication since had been my mad, interminable, demanding, love-struck letters, the tone of which made
Notes from Underground
seem the tranquil recollections of a lucid mind. Behind her I could see buffed linoleum, a ceramic pig devouring
ceramic corn, more plants. “I’m sorry,” I began, staring down at my feet and losing my train of thought: a ragged hole the size of a silver dollar had eaten through the canvas of my right sneaker, dissolving the sweatsock beneath and exposing the serried rank of my upper toe joints. Stiff, naked, red, the toes looked as if they should be cracked and dipped in drawn butter.
The cat nuzzled Petra’s ankles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the oscillating planter had begun to lose momentum, winding down like a hypnotist’s watch. In the space of time I’d been standing on her doorstep groping for words, a legion of tired old men had breathed their last, interest had accrued, vows been exchanged, and the worldwide army of hollow-eyed widows had brewed enough tea to fill all the petroleum storage tanks in Houston. Finally Petra stepped back and held the door open. “My God,” she said, “what was it—a car crash?”
I told her everything.
We sat at the kitchen table amid a welter of corn plants, rubber plants, dracaena, coleus and African violets, sipping Postum and watching the night sky fall away to tatters in the east, while I told her about the model hole, about the bear, about the half million that had gone through more permutations than the federal arts budget. I told her about Gesh, Phil, Vogelsang, Sapers, Marlon, about the rain, the heat, the rattlesnakes, airplanes, poison oak. I told her about the fire.
The sky was pale, the trees beyond the windows brightening as if a filter had been lifted, when I closed out my apologia with the harrowing tale of the hospital and Jerpbak’s latest victims. “I threw his keys in the woods,” I said, my voice lifting with the memory of it.
Petra got up from the table and put the kettle on again. “More Postum?”
Postum. It tasted like boiled cinders. “Sure,” I said.
I’d been talking for over an hour. I’d begun hesitantly, guiltily, alluding obliquely to my conduct at the heifer festival and then staring down at the spectacle of my clasped hands. “I’ve been keeping something from you,” I said. If she’d looked angry, tired, sympathetic and apprehensive by degrees as she’d opened the door, let me in and offered me a seat, now she gave me a look of concentrated attention: the enigma was about to be unraveled.
Yes, I’d insulted her friends, deserted her on our first and only date, plagued her with rambling letters and appeared on her doorstep at five in the morning—but there were extenuating circumstances. I was a nice guy—trustworthy, loyal, sane and sympathetic—really, I was. “We’re not up here for our health,” I said.
Her laugh surprised me. She reached out to pat my bandaged hand. “I can see that,” she said.
I acknowledged her point with a tight, rueful smile, then lowered my head again. “We’re growing pot.”
Petra had looked at me curiously, as if in that moment I’d emerged from darkness to light, as if I’d molted, sloughed off a strange skin and metamorphosed into the familiar. “So that’s it,” she said, smiling a wide, beautiful, close-lipped smile. “I should have guessed. And I thought you were schizophrenic or something. Or married.” She was watching me over the rim of her cup, her eyes flaring with amusement. “Remember Teddy? And Sarah?” I nodded. I wanted to get it over with, give her all the sorry details, I wanted to justify myself, I wanted absolution. “They’ve got a patch too. So does Alice.” She gestured at the dark windowpane. “I’ve even got five plants myself, buried out there in a clump of pampas grass. Everybody grows around here—it’s no big thing.”
This was my moment of confession, yes, my moment of humiliation, my scourging—but she’d gone too far. Did she think I was some piker, some weekend dirtbagger, some Teddy? “I’m talking two thousand plants.”