Without a Hero

by T. C. Boyle

  “C’mon, Mike,” Nicole said, and she reached out to pat his hand but he snatched it away in a rage. “C’mon, baby, it’s not the end of the world.” He looked at her in that moment, the triumph shining in her eyes, and he wanted to slap her, choke her, get up from the table, snatch a rifle from the rack and pump a couple slugs into her.

  He was about to snap back at her when the swinging doors to the kitchen parted and the colored guy came in with a pot of coffee and set it on the table. Roland, that was his name. He was surprised they didn’t call him Zulu or Jambo or something to go along with the silly skirts that were supposed to make him look like a native. Christ, he’d like to get up and drill him too, for that matter. About the only break he’d had on this trip was that Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose had taken to sleeping till noon.

  “Mike,” Nicole pleaded, but he wouldn’t hear her. Brooding, burning, plotting his revenge on every lender, shopkeeper and homeowner from the San Fernando Valley to Hancock Park, Mike Bender sipped moodily at his tepid instant coffee and awaited the great white hunter.

  Puff was late to breakfast, but he looked rejuvenated—had he dyed his hair, was that it?—beaming, a fountain of energy, as if he’d stolen the flame from the King of Encino himself. “Good morning,” he boomed in his phony West End accent, practically inhaling his mustache, and then he gave Nicole a look that was unmistakable and Mike felt it all pouring out of him, like lava from a volcano.

  “No more lions, right?” Mike said, his voice low and choked.

  “Afraid not,” Puff answered, sitting himself down at the head of the table and smearing a slab of toast with Marmite. “As I told you yesterday, we’ve got all the females you want, but the males are juveniles, no manes at all to speak of.”

  “That stinks.”

  Bernard regarded Bender for a long moment and saw the child who’d never grown up, the rich kid, the perennial hacker and duffer, the parvenu stifled. He looked from Bender to the wife and back again—what was she doing with a clown like that?—and had a fleeting but powerful vision of her stretched out beside him in bed, breasts, thighs, puffy lips and all. “Listen, Mike,” he said, “forget it. It happens to everybody. I thought we’d go for eland today—”

  “Eland. Shit on eland.”

  “All right, then—water buff. A lot of them say Mbogo is the most dangerous animal in Africa, bar none.”

  The sunny eyes went dark with rage. “This isn’t Africa,” Bender spat. “It’s Bakersfield.”

  Bernard had tried hard, and he hated it when they did that, when they punctured the illusion he so carefully nurtured. It was the illusion he was selling, after all—close your eyes and you’re in Africa—and in a way he’d wanted the place to be Africa, wanted to make the old stories come alive, wanted to bring back the thrill of the great days, if only for a moment at a time. But it was more than that, too: Puff’s African Came Ranch stood as a testament and memorial to the towering figure of Bernard’s father.

  Bernard Puff, Sr., had been one of the last great white hunters of East Africa—friend and compatriot of Percival and Ionides, host to some of the biggest names of American cinema and European aristocracy. He married an American heiress and they built a place in the White Highlands, dined with Isak Dinesen, ate game the year round. And then the war turned the place on its head and he sought refuge in America, losing himself in the vastness of the Southwest and the pockets of his in-laws. As a boy, Bernard had thrilled to the stories of the old days, fingering the ragged white scar a bush pig’s tusks had left on his father’s forearm, cleaning and oiling the ancient weapons that had stopped rhino, elephant, leopard and lion, gazing for hours into the bright glass eyes of the trophies mounted on the wall in the den, the very names—sable, kudu, bushbuck, kongoni—playing like an incantation in his head. He’d tried to do it justice, had devoted his life to it, and now here was this sorehead, this condominium peddler, running it all down.

  “All right,” he said. “Granted. What do you want me to do? I’ve got more lions coming in at the end of the month, prime cats they’ve trapped and relocated from Tsavo East…” (He was fudging here: actually, he had an emaciated sack of bones lined up at the San Francisco Zoo, a cat so old the public was offended by it, and another that had broken its leg three times jumping through a hoop with a West German circus.) “Eland we have, water buff, oryx, gazelle, hyena—I’ve even got a couple ostrich for you. But unless you want a female, no lion. I’m sorry.”

  And then, a light shining up from the depths, the glitter came back into the dealmaker’s eyes, the smile widened, the tennis pro and backyard swimmer climbed out from behind the mask of the petulant real estate wonder boy. Bender was grinning. He leaned forward. “What about the elephant?”

  “What about it?” Bernard lifted the toast to his lips, then set it down carefully again on the edge of his plate. The wife was watching him now, and Roland, refilling the coffee mugs, paused to give him a look.

  “I want it.”

  Bernard stared down at the plate and fussed a moment with the coffeepot, the sugar, the cream. He hated to part with her, though he was pretty sure he could replace her—and the feed bills were killing him. Even in her dotage, Bessie Bee could put away more in an afternoon than a herd of Guernseys would go through in a winter. He gave the wife a cool glance, then shot his eyes at Bender. “Eighteen grand,” he said.

  Bender looked uncertain, his eyes glittering still, but sunk in on themselves, as if in awe at the enormity of the deal. “I’ll want the head,” he said finally, “the whole thing, stuffed and mounted—and yes, I know it’s big, but I can deal with that, I’ve got the space, believe me…and the feet, I want the feet, for those, uh, what do you call them, umbrella stands?”

  They found her in a brushy ravine, just beyond the swimming-pool-cum-water-hole. She was having a dust bath, powdering her pitted hide with fine pale dirt till she looked like an enormous wad of dough rolled in flour. Bernard could see where she’d trampled the high grass that hid the blue lip of the pool and uprooted half a ton of water lily and cattail, which she’d mounded up in a festering heap on the coping. He cursed under his breath when he saw the stand of eucalyptus she’d reduced to splinters and the imported fever tree she’d stripped of bark. It was his policy to keep her tethered—precisely to avoid this sort of wholesale destruction—but when there were guests on the ranch, he let her roam. He was regretting it now, and thinking he’d have to remember to get Espinoza to call the landscaping company first thing in the morning, when Bender’s voice brought him back to the moment. The voice was harsh, petulant, a rising squawk of protest: “But it’s only got one tusk!”

  Bernard sighed. It was true—she’d broken off half her left tusk somewhere along the line, but he’d gotten so used to her he hardly noticed. But there was Bender, sitting beside him in the Jeep, the wife in the back, the guns stacked up and the cooler full, and Bender was going to try to gouge him on the price, he could see it coming.

  “When we said eighteen, I assumed we were talking a trophy animal,” Bender said, and Bernard turned to him. “But now, I don’t know.”

  Bernard just wanted it over with. Something told him he was making a mistake in going after Bessie Bee—the place wouldn’t seem the same without her—but he was committed at this point, and he didn’t want any arguments. “Okay,” he sighed, shifting the weight of his paunch from left to right. “Seventeen.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen-five, and that’s as low as I’m going to go. You don’t know what it’s like to skin out something like this, let alone disposing of the carcass.”

  “You’re on,” Bender said, swiveling his head to give the wife a look, and then they were out of the Jeep and checking their weapons. Bender had a .470 Rigby elephant rifle and Bernard his Nitro—just in case the morning brought a reprise of the lion fiasco. The wife, who wasn’t doing any shooting, had brought along a video camera. Roland was back at the house with a truck, a chain saw and a crew of Mexicans to clea
n up the mess once the deed was done.

  It was still early, and the heat hadn’t come up full yet—Bernard guessed it must have been eighty, eighty-five or so—but he was sweating already. He was always a little edgy on a hunt—especially with a clown like Bender twitching at his elbow, and most especially after what had happened with the lion. Bender was writhing and stamping up a storm, but his eyes were cool and focused as they strolled through the mesquite and tumbleweed and down into the ravine.

  Bessie Bee was white with dust, flapping her ears and blowing up great clouds of it with her trunk. From a hundred yards you couldn’t see much more than flying dirt, as if a tornado had touched down; at fifty, the rucked and seamed head of the old elephant began to take on shape. Though there was little more risk involved than in potting a cow in its stall, Bernard was habitually cautious, and he stopped Bender there, at fifty yards. A pair of vultures drifted overhead, attracted by the Jeep, which they knew as the purveyor of bleeding flesh and carrion. The elephant sneezed. A crow called out somewhere behind them. “This is as far as we go,” Bernard said.

  Bender gaped at him, popping his joints and bugging his eyes like a fraternity boy thwarted by the ID checker at the door of a bar full of sorority girls. “All I can see is dust,” he said.

  Bernard was deep inside himself now. He checked the bolt on the big gun and flipped back the safety. “Just wait,” he said. “Find a spot—here, right here; you can use this rock to steady your aim—and just wait a minute, that’s all. Shell tire of this in a minute or so, and when the dust settles you’ll have your shot.”

  And so they crouched in the dirt, hunter and guide, and propped their guns up on a coarse red table of sandstone and waited for the dust to clear and the heat to rise and the vultures to sink down out of the sky in great ragged swoops.

  For her part, Bessie Bee was more than a little suspicious. Though her eyes were poor, the Jeep was something she could see, and she could smell the hominids half a mile away. She should have been matriarch of a fine wild herd of elephants at Amboseli or Tsavo or the great Bahi swamp, but she’d lived all her fifty-two years on this strange and unnatural continent, amid the stink and confusion of man. She’d been goaded, beaten, tethered, taught to dance and stand on one leg and grasp the sorry wisp of a tail that hung from the sorry flanks of another sorry elephant like herself as they paraded before the teeming monkey masses in one forbidding arena after another. And then there was this, a place that stank of the oily secrets of the earth, and another tether and more men. She heard the thunder of the guns and she smelled the blood on the air and she knew they were killing. She knew, too, that the Jeep was there for her.

  The dust settled round her, sifting down in a maelstrom of fine white motes. She flared her ears and trumpeted and lifted the standing timber of her right front foot from the ground and let it sway before her. She was tired of the goad, the tether, the brittle dry tasteless straw and cattle feed, tired of the sun and the air and the night and the morning: she charged.

  She let her nose guide her till the guns crashed, once, twice, three times, and a new sort of goad tore into her, invasive and hot, but it just made her angry, made her come on all the harder, invincible, unstoppable, twelve feet at the shoulder and eight standing tons, no more circuses, no more palanquins, no more goads. And then she saw them, two pitiful sticklike figures springing up from behind a rock she could swallow and spit up three times over.

  It wasn’t panic exactly, not at first. Bender shot wide, and the heavy shock of the gun seemed to stun him. Bessie Bee came straight for them, homing in on them, and Bernard bit down on his mustache and shouted, “Shoot! Shoot, you idiot!”

  He got his wish. Bender fired again, finally, but all he managed to do was blow some hair off the thing’s back. Bernard stood then, the rifle to his shoulder, and though he remembered the lion and could already hear the nagging whining mealy-mouthed voice of Bender complaining over lunch of being denied this trophy too, the situation was critical; desperate, even—who would have thought it of Bessie Bee?—and he squeezed the trigger to the jerk and roar of the big gun.

  Nothing. Had he missed? But then all at once he felt himself caught up in a landslide, the, rush of air, the reek of elephant, and he was flying, actually flying, high out over the plain and into the blue.

  When he landed, he sat up and found that his shoulder had come loose from the socket and that there was some sort of fluid—blood, his own blood—obscuring the vision in his right eye. He was in shock, he told himself, repeating it aloud, over and over: “I’m in shock, I’m in shock.” Everything seemed hazy, and the arm didn’t hurt much, though it should have, nor the gash in his scalp either. But didn’t he have a gun? And where was it?

  He looked up at the noise, a shriek of great conviction, and saw Bessie Bee rubbing her foot thoughtfully, almost tenderly, over Mike Bender’s prostrate form. Bender seemed to be naked—or no, he didn’t seem to be wearing any skin, either—and his head had been vastly transformed, so much more compact now. But there was something else going on too, something the insurance company wouldn’t be able to rectify, of that he was sure, if only in a vague way—“I’m in shock,” he repeated. This something was a shriek too, definitely human, but it rose and caught hold of the tail of the preceding shriek and climbed atop it, and before the vacuum of silence could close in there was another shriek, and another, until even the screams of the elephant were a whisper beside it.

  It was Mrs. Bender, the wife, Nicole, one of the finest expressions of her species, and she was running from the Jeep and exercising her lungs. The Jeep seemed to be lying on its side—such an odd angle to see it from—and Mrs. Bender’s reedy form was in that moment engulfed by a moving wall of flesh, the big flanks blotting the scene from view, all that movement and weight closing out the little aria of screams with a final elephantine roll of the drums.

  It might have been seconds later, or an hour—Bernard didn’t know. He sat there, an arm dangling from the shoulder, idly wiping the blood from his eye with his good hand while the naked black vultures drifted down on him with an air of professional interest. And then all at once, strange phenomenon, the sun was gone, and the vultures, and a great black shadow fell over him. He looked up dimly into the canvas of that colossal face framed in a riot of ears. “Bessie Bee?” he said. “Bessie Bee? Shamba?”

  Half a mile away, fanned by the gentle breeze of the air conditioner, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, two months short of her thirteenth birthday and sated with chocolate and dreams of lean spike-haired adolescents with guitars and leather jackets, shifted her head on the pillow and opened her eyes. She was, in that waking moment, sole inheritor of the Bender real estate empire, and all the monies and houses and stocks and bonds and properties that accrued to it, not to mention the beach house and the Ferrari Testarossa, but she wasn’t yet aware of it. Something had awakened her, some ripple on the great pond of life. For just a moment there, over the drone of the air conditioner, she thought she’d heard a scream.

  But no. It was probably just some peacock or baboon or whatever. Or that pitiful excuse for an elephant. She sat up, reached into her cooler for a root beer and shook her head. Tacky, she thought. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

  HOPES RISE

  I TOOK MY ACHING BACK to my brother-in-law, the doctor, and he examined me, ran some X-rays, and then sat me down in his office. Gazing out the window on the early manifestations of spring—inchoate buds crowning the trees, pussy willows at the edge of the marsh, the solitary robin probing the stiff yellow grass—I felt luxurious and philosophical. So what if my back felt as if it had been injected with a mixture of battery acid and Louisiana hot sauce? There was life out there, foliate and rich, a whole planet seething with possibility. It was spring, time to wake up and dance to the music of life.

  My brother-in-law had finished fiddling with his unfashionable beard and pushing his reading glasses up and down the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Peter,” he said in h
is mellifluous healing tones, “we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”

  A hundred corny jokes flew to my lips, but I just smiled and nodded.

  “We’re close, right?”

  I reminded him that he was married to my sister and had fathered my niece and nephew.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “Now that that’s been established, I think I can reveal to you the first suppressed axiom of the medical cabal.”

  I leaned forward, a fierce pain gripping the base of my spine, like a dog shaking a rat in its teeth. Out on the lawn, the robin beat its shabby wings and was sucked away on the breeze.

  My brother-in-law held the moment, and then, enunciating with elaborate care, he said, “Any injury you sustain up to the age of twenty-one, give or take a year, is better the next day; after twenty-one, any injury you sustain will haunt you to the grave.”

  I gave a hoot of laughter that made the imaginary dog dig his claws in, and then, wincing with the pain, I said, “And what’s the second?”

  He was grinning at me, showing off the white, even, orthodontically assisted marvel of his teeth. “Second what?”

  “Axiom. Of the medical cabal.”