“Hello,” he said, stopping a few feet from us and staring first at my face, then at Felicia’s breasts, and finally, with an effort, bending to check the laces of his boots. “Glad to see you two made it,” he said, speaking to the sand.
“Likewise,” I returned.
Over lunch on the deck — shrimp salad sandwiches on Felicia-baked bread — we traded stories. It seems he was hiking in the mountains when the pestilence descended—“The mountains?” I interrupted. “Whereabouts?”
“Oh,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “up in the Sierras, just above this little town — you’ve probably never heard of it — Fish Fry Flats?”
I let him go on a while, explaining how he’d lost his girlfriend and wandered for days before he finally came out on a mountain road and appropriated a car to go on down to Los Angeles—“One big cemetery”—and how he’d come up the coast and had been wandering ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such exhilaration, such a rush of excitement, such perfect and inimitable a sense of closure.
I couldn’t keep from interrupting him again. “I’m clairvoyant,” I said, raising my glass to the man sitting opposite me, to Felicia and her breasts, to the happy fishes in the teeming seas and the birds flocking without number in the unencumbered skies. “Your name’s Howard, right?”
Howard was stunned. He set down his sandwich and wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips. “How did you guess?” he said, gaping up at me out of eyes that were innocent and pure, the newest eyes in the world.
I just smiled and shrugged, as if it were my secret. “After lunch,” I said, “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”
A Note on the Author
T.C. Boyle’s novels include World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Inner Circle and, most recently, When the Killing’s Done. His short story collections include Tooth and Claw and Wild Child, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Granta and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.
T.C. Boyle was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.