T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Regina showed up three days later. For the past few years she’d rented a room up here over the holidays, ostensibly for her health, the cross-country skiing, and the change of scene, but actually so she could display her backend in stretch pants to the sex-crazed hermits who lived year-round amidst the big pines and sequoias. She was from Los Angeles, where she worked as a dental hygienist. Her teeth were perfect, she smiled nonstop and with the serenity of the Mona Lisa, and she wore the kind of bra that was popular in the fifties—the kind that thrust the breasts out of her ski sweater like nuclear warheads. She’d been known to give the tumble to the occasional tourist or one of the lucky locals when the mood took her, but she really had it for Marshall. For two weeks every Christmas and another week at Easter, she became a fixture at the bar, as much a part of the decor as the moosehead or the stuffed bear, perched on a barstool in Norwegian sweater, red ski pants, and mukluks, sipping a champagne cocktail and waiting for him to get off work. Sometimes she couldn’t hold out and someone else would walk off with her while Marshall scowled from behind the grill, but usually she just waited there for him like a flower about to drop its petals.
She came into the white world that afternoon like a foretaste of the good times to come—city women, weekend cowboys, grandmas, children, dogs, and lawyers were on their way, trees and decorations going up, the big festival of the goose-eating Christians about to commence—rolling into the snowbound parking lot in her Honda with the neat little chain-wrapped tires that always remind me of Tonka toys. It was about 4:00 P.M., the sky was a sorrowful gray, and a loose flurry was dusting the huge logs piled up on the veranda. In she came, stamping and shaking, the knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows, already on the lookout for Marshall.
I was sitting in my usual place, working on my fifth beer, a third of the way through the check Marshall had brought me three days previous and calculating gloomily that I’d be out of money by Christmas at this rate. Scooter was bartending, and his daughter-in-law Mae-Mae, who happened to be a widow, was hunched morosely over a Tom Collins three stools up from me. Mae-Mae had lost her husband to the mountain two years earlier (or, rather, to the tortuous road that connected us to civilization and snaked up 7300 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley in a mere twenty-six miles, treacherous as a goat trail in the Himalayas), and hadn’t spoken or smiled since. She was a Thai. Scooter’s son, a Vietnam hero, had brought her back from Southeast Asia with him. When Jill was off, or the holiday crowd bearing down on the place, Scooter would drive up the mountain from his cabin at Little Creek, elevation 5500 feet, hang his ski parka on a hook in back, and shake, stir, and blend cocktails. He brought Mae-Mae with him to get her out of the house.
Scooter and I had been discussing some of the finer points of the prevent defense with respect to the coming pro-football playoffs when Regina’s Honda rolled into the lot, and now we gave it up to gape at her as she shook herself like a go-go dancer, opened her jacket to expose the jutting armaments of her breasts, and slid onto a barstool. Scooter slicked back his white hair and gave her a big grin. “Well,” he said, fumbling for her name, “um, uh, good to see you again.”
She flashed him her fluoridated smile, glanced past the absorbed Mae-Mae to where I sat grinning like an overworked dog, then turned back to him. “Marshall around?”
Scooter informed her that Marshall had gone down the mountain on a supply run and should be back by dinnertime. And what would she like?
She sighed, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. The hat she was wearing was part of a set—hand-knit, imported from Scandinavia, woven from ram’s whiskers by the trolls themselves, two hundred bucks at I. Magnin. Or something like that. It was gray, like her eyes. She swept it from her head with a flourish, fluffed out her short black hair and ordered a champagne cocktail. I looked at my watch.
I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do? It was the same way up on the mountain. Big Timber was a collection of maybe a hundred widely scattered cabins atop a broad-beamed peak in the southern Sierras. The cabins belonged to summer people from L.A. and San Diego, to cross-country skiers, gynecologists, talent agents, ad men, drunks, and nature lovers, for the most part, and to twenty-seven hardcore antisocial types who called the place home year-round. I was one of this latter group. So was Jill. Of the remaining twenty-five xenophobes and rustics, three were women, and two of them were married and post-menopausal to boot. The sole remaining female was an alcoholic poet with a walleye who lived in her parents’ cabin on the outer verge of the development and hated men. TV reception was spotty, radio nonexistent, and the nearest library a one-room affair at the base of the mountain that boasted three copies of The Thorn Birds and the complete works of Irving Wallace.
And so we drank.
Social life, such as it was, revolved around Marshall’s lodge, which dispensed all the amenities in a single huge room, from burgers and chili omelets to antacid pills, cold remedies, cans of pickled beets, and toilet paper, as well as spirits, human fraternity, and a chance to fight off alien invaders at the controls of the video game in the corner. Marshall organized his Friday-night family dinners, did a turkey thing on Thanksgiving and Christmas, threw a New Year’s party, and kept the bar open on weekends through the long solitary winter, thinking not so much of profit, but of our sanity. The lodge also boasted eight woodsy hotel rooms, usually empty, but now—with the arrival of Boo and his fellow hit men, Regina, and a couple other tourists—beginning to fill up.
On the day Regina rolled in, Jill had taken advantage of the break in the weather to schuss down the mountain in her station wagon and do some Christmas shopping. I was supposed to have gone with her, but we’d had a fight. Over Boo. I’d come in the night before from my late-afternoon stroll to see Jill half spread across the bar with a blank bovine look on her face while Boo mumbled his baritone blandishments into her eyes from about six inches away. I saw that, and then I saw that she’d locked fingers with him, as if they’d been arm wrestling or something. Marshall was out in the kitchen, Josh was sticking it to the video game, and Scott must have been up in his room. “Hey,” Boo said, casually turning his head, “what’s happening?” Jill gave me a defiant look before extricating herself and turning her back to fool around with the cash register. I stood there in the doorway, saying nothing. Bishzz, bishzz went the video game, zoot-zoot-zoot. Marshall dropped something out in the kitchen. “Buy this man a drink, honey,” Boo said. I turned and walked out the door.
“Christ, I can’t believe you,” Jill had said when I came round to pick her up after work. “It’s my job, you know? What am I supposed to do, hang a sign around my neck that says ‘Property of M. Koerner’?”
I told her I thought that was a pretty good idea.
“Forget the ride,” she said. “I’m walking.”
“And what about the bear?” I said, knowing how the specter of it terrified her, knowing that she dreaded walking those dark snowlit roads for fear of chancing across him—knowing it and wanting for her to admit it, to tell me she needed me.
But all she said was “Screw the bear,” and then she was gone.
Now I ordered another beer, sauntered along the bar, and sat down one stool up from Regina. “Hi,” I said, “remember me? Michael Koerner? I live up back of Malloy’s place?”
She narrowed her eyes and gave me a smile I could feel all the way down in the remotest nodes of my reproductive tract. She no more knew me than she would have known a Chinese peasant plucked at random from the faceless hordes. “Sure,” she said.
We made small talk. How slippery the roads were—worse than last year. A renegade bear? Really? Marshall grew a beard?
I’d bought her two champagne cocktails and was working on yet another beer, when Jill catapulted through the door, arms festooned with foil-wrapped packages and eyes ablaze with goodwill and holiday cheer; Adrian tagged alo
It was then that Boo came into sight. Distant, snow-softened, trudging across the barren white expanse of the lot as if in a dream. He was wearing his white parka, hood up, a rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he was dragging something behind him. Something heavy and dark, a long low-slung form that raveled out from his heels like a shadow. When he paused to straighten up and catch his streaming breath, I saw with a shock that the carcass of an animal lay at his feet, red and raw like a gash in the snow. “Hey!” I shouted. “Boo got the bear!” And the next minute we were all out in the windblown parking lot, hemmed in by the forbidding ranks of the trees and the belly of the gray deflated sky, as Boo looked up puzzled from the carcass of a gutted deer. “What happened, the bar catch fire?” he said, his sharp blue eyes parrying briefly with mine, swooping past Scooter, Adrian, and Mae-Mae to pause a moment over Jill and finally lock on Regina’s wide-eyed stare. He was grinning.
The deer’s black lip was pulled back from ratty yellowed teeth; its eyes were opaque in death. Boo had slit it from chest to crotch, and a half-frozen bulb of grayish intestine poked from the lower end of the ragged incision. I felt foolish.
“Bait,” Boo said in explanation, his eyes roving over us again. “I’m leaving a blood smear you could follow with your eyes closed and your nose stopped up. Then I’m going to hang the meat up a tree and wait for Mr. Bear.”
Jill turned away, a bit theatrically I thought, and made small noises of protest and disgust on the order of “the poor animal,” then took Adrian by the hand and pulled him back in the direction of the lodge. Mae-Mae stared through us all, this carnage like that other that had claimed her husband’s life, end over end in the bubble of their car, blood on the slope. Regina looked at Boo. He stood over the fallen buck, grinning like a troglodyte with his prey, then bent to catch the thing by its antlers and drag it off across the lot as if it were an old rug for the church rummage sale.
That night the lodge was hopping. Tourists had begun to trickle in and there were ten or twelve fresh faces at the bar. I ate a chicken pot pie and a can of cold beets in the solitude of my cabin, wrapped a tacky black-and-gold scarf round my neck, and ambled through the dark featureless forest to the lodge. As I stepped through the door I smelled perfume, sweet drinks, body heat, and caught the sensuous click of the pool balls as they punctuated the swell of riotous voices churning up around me. Holiday cheer, oh, yes, indeed.
(ill was tending bar. Everyone in the development was there, including the old wives and the walleyed poetess. An array of roaring strangers and those recognized vaguely from previous seasons stood, slouched, and stamped round the bar or huddled over steaks in the booths to the rear. Marshall was behind the grill. I eased up to the bar between a bearded stranger in a gray felt cowboy hat and a familiar-looking character who shot me a glance of mortal dislike and then turned away. I was absently wondering what I could possibly have done to offend this guy (winter people—I could hardly remember what I’d said and done last week, let alone last year), when I spotted Regina. And Boo. They were sitting at a booth, the table before them littered with empty glasses and beer bottles. Good, I said to myself, an insidious little smile of satisfaction creeping across my lips, and I glanced toward Jill.
I could see that she was watching them out of the corner of her eye, though an impartial observer might have guessed she was giving her full attention to Alf Cornwall, the old gas bag who sat across the bar from her and toyed with a glass of peppermint schnapps while he went on ad nauseam about the only subject dear to him—i.e., the lamentable state of his health. “Jill,” I barked with malicious joy, “how about some service down here?”
She gave me a look that would have corroded metal, then heaved back from the bar and poured me a long slow shot of Wild Turkey and an even slower glass of beer. I winked at her as she set the drinks down and scraped my money from the bar. “Not tonight, Michael,” she said, “I don’t feel up to it,” and her tone was so dragged down and lugubrious she could have been a professional mourner. It was then that I began to realize just how much Boo had affected her (and by extension, how little I had), and I glanced over my shoulder to focus a quick look of jealous hatred on him. When Jill set down my change I grabbed her wrist. “What the hell do you mean ‘not tonight,’” I hissed. “Now I can’t even talk to you, or what?”
She looked at me like a martyr, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman deserted by her husband in the backend of nowhere and saddled with an unhappy kid and a deadbeat sometime beau to whom the prospect of marriage was about as appealing as a lobotomy, she looked at me like a woman who’s given up on romance. Then she jerked her arm away and slouched off to hear all the fascinating circumstances attending Alf Cornwall’s most recent bowel movement.
The crowd began to thin out about eleven, and Marshall came out from behind the grill to saunter up to the bar for a Rémy-Martin. He too seemed preter-naturally interested in Alf Cornwall’s digestive tract, and sniffed meditatively at his cognac for five minutes or so before he picked up the glass and strolled over to join Boo and Regina. He slid in next to Regina, nodding and smiling, but he didn’t look too pleased.
Like Boo, Marshall was big. Big-hearted, big-bellied, with grizzled hair and a beard flecked with white. He was in his mid-forties, twice divorced, and he had a casual folksy way about him that women found appealing, or unique—or whatever. Women who came up the mountain, that is. Jill had had a thing with him the year before I moved in, he was one of the chief reasons the walleyed poetess hated men, and any number of cross-country ski bunnies, doctors’ wives, and day trippers had taken some extracurricular exercise in the oak-framed waterbed that dominated his room in the back of the lodge. Boo didn’t stand a chance. Ten minutes after Marshall had sat down Boo was back up at the bar, a little unsteady from all he’d had to drink, and looking Jill up and down like he had one thing on his mind.
I was on my third shot and fifth beer, the lights were low, the fire going strong, and the twenty-foot Christmas tree lit up like a satellite. Alf Cornwall had taken his bullshit home with him; the poetess, the wives, and two-thirds of the new people had cleared out. I was discussing beach erosion with the guy in the cowboy hat, who as it turned out was from San Diego, and keeping an eye on Boo and Jill at the far end of the bar. “Well, Christ,” San Diego roared as if I was half a mile away, “you put up them godforsaken useless damn seawalls and what have you got, I ask you? Huh?”
I wasn’t listening. Boo was stroking Jill’s hand like a glove salesman, Marshall and Regina were grappling in the booth, and I was feeling sore and hurt and left out. A log burned through and tumbled into the coals with a thud. Marshall got up to poke it, and all of a sudden I was seething. Turning my back on San Diego, I pushed off of my stool and strode to the end of the bar.
Jill saw the look on my face and drew back. I put my hand on Boo’s shoulder and watched him turn to me in slow motion, his face huge, the scar glistening over his eyebrow. “You can’t do that,” I said.
He just looked at me.
“Michael,” Jill said.
“Huh?” he said. “Do what?” Then he turned his head to look at Jill, and when he swung back round he knew.
I shoved him, hard, as he was coming up off the barstool, and he went down on one knee before
“Goddamnit,” Marshall was roaring, “that’s about enough.” His face was red to the roots of his whiskers. “Michael,” he said—or blared, I should say—and then he waved his hand in disgust. Boo stood behind him, giving me a bad look. “I think you’ve had enough, Michael,” Marshall said. “Go on home.”
I wanted to throw it right back in his face, wanted to shout obscenities, take them both on, break up the furniture, and set the tree afire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sixteen: I was thirty-one years old and I was reasonable. The lodge was the only bar in twenty-six miles and I’d be mighty thirsty and mighty lonely both if I was banished for good. “All right,” I said. “All right.” And then, as I shrugged into my jacket: “Sorry.”
Boo was grinning, Jill looked like she had the night the bear broke in. Regina was studying me with either interest or amusement—I couldn’t tell which—Scooter looked like he had to go to the bathroom, and San Diego just stepped aside. I pulled the door closed behind me. Softly.
Outside, it was snowing. Big, warm, healing flakes. It was the kind of snow my father used to hold his hands out to, murmuring, God must be up there plucking chickens. I wrapped the scarf round my throat and was about to start off across the lot when I saw something moving through the blur of falling flakes. The first thing I thought of was some late arrival from down below, some part-timer come to claim his cabin. The second thing I thought of was the bear.
I was wrong on both counts. The snow drove down against the dark branchless pillars of the treetrunks, chalk strokes on a blackboard, I counted off three breaths, and then Mae-Mae emerged from the gloom. “Michael?” she said, coming up to me.