T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  Morning

  I wake in a sweat. Everything still. Andrea, all leg, shoulder, navel and cleavage, is snoring, her breath grating like bark stripped from a tree. Beside her, the pilot: captain’s cap pulled over his face, gun tucked in his belt. The professor, who had the last watch, is curled in his chair asleep. Outside, the fire has burned to fine white ash and a coatimundi steals across the clearing. Something is wrong—I feel it like a bad dream that refuses to end. Then I glance over at the mime. He looks exactly like John F. Kennedy lying in state. Dead.

  There is no time for ceremony. No time in fact for burial. The pilot, sour with sleep, drops a blanket over the frozen white face and leads us cautiously out of the plane, and into the bush. We shoulder our clubs, the white bundles. Our life jackets glow in the seeping gloom. The pilot, Andrea, the professor, me. A team. Pass the baton and run, I think, and chuckle to myself. My expectation of survival is low, but I follow anyway, and watch, and hope, and wait.

  We walk for three hours, slimed in sweat, struggling through the leaves, creepers, tendrils, vines, shoots, stems and stalks, over the colossal rotting trunks, into the slick algae-choked ponds. Birds and monkeys screeching in the trees. Agoutis stumbling off at our feet. Snakes. The trails of ants. And in the festering water, a tapir, big as a pregnant horse. I develop a terrible thirst (the pilot, of course, is custodian of our water supply). My throat is sore, lips gummed. I think of the stories I have heard—thirst-crazed explorers plunging their heads into those scummy pools, drinking deep of every foul and crippling disease known to man. And I think of the six shiny tins in my pack.

  Suddenly we are stopping (halftime, I suppose). The pilot consults his compass, the great jaw working. Andrea, 97 percent exposed flesh, is like a first-aid dummy. Slashes, paper cuts, welts, sweet droplets of blood, a leech or two, insects spotting her skin like a terminal case of moles. We throw ourselves down in the wet, breathing hard. Things of the forest floor instantly dart up our pantlegs, down our collars. Andrea asks the pilot if he has the vaguest fucking idea of where we’re headed.

  He frowns down at the compass.

  She asks again.

  He curses.

  She holds up her middle finger.

  The pilot takes a step toward her, lip curled back, when suddenly his expression goes soft. There is a look of surprise, of profound perplexity on his face, as if he’d just swallowed an ice cube. In his neck, a dart. A tiny thing, with feathers (picture a fishing lure pinned beneath his chin like a miniature bow tie). And then from the bushes, a sound like a hundred bums spitting in the gutter. Two more darts appear in the pilot’s neck, a fourth and fifth in his chest. He begins to giggle as if it were a great joke, then falls to his knees, tongue caught between his teeth. We watch, horror-struck. His eyes glaze, the arms twitch at his sides, the giggles rising like a wave, cresting higher, curling, and then breaking—he drops like a piece of flotsam, face down in the mulch.

  We panic. The professor screams. Andrea snatches the pilot’s pistol and begins laying waste to the vegetation. I stretch out flat, secrete my head, wishing I had a blanket to pull over it. A random bullet sprays mud and leaf in my hair. The professor screams again. Andrea has shot him. In the eye. When I look up, the revolver is in her lap and she is fumbling with the magazine. There is a dart in her cheek. It is no time to lose consciousness. But I do.

  Afternoon

  I wake to the sound of human voices, the smell of smoke. I lie still, a wax doll, though something tears persistently at the spider-welt on my chest. My eye winks open: there is a campfire, nine or ten naked men squatting round it, eating. Gnawing at bones. Their skin is the color of stained walnut, their bodies lean as raw muscle, their lips distended with wooden disks. Each has a red band painted across his face at eye level, from the brow to the bridge of the nose, like a party mask. There is no trace of my late teammates.

  I find I am suffering from anxiety, the image of the fly-blackened heads screeching through my mind like a flight of carrion birds, the quick dark voices and the sound of tooth on bone grating in my ears. I am on the verge of bolting. But at that moment I become aware of a new figure in the group—pasty white skin, red boils and blotches, a fallen, purplish mask. The cat man. Naked and flabby. His penis wrapped in bark, pubic hair plucked. I sit up. And suddenly the whole assembly is on its feet, fingers twitching at bowstrings and blowguns. The cat man motions with his hand and the weapons drop. Barefooted, he hobbles over to me, and the others turn back to their meal. “How you feeling?” he says, squatting beside me.

  I crush an insect against my chest, rake my nails over the throbbing spider-welt. I opt for sincerity. “Like a piece of shit.”

  He looks hard at me, deciding something. A fat fluffy tabby scampers across the clearing, begins rubbing itself against his thigh. I recognize Egmont. He strokes it, working his finger under the ribbon round its neck. “Don’t ask any questions,” he says. And then: “Listen: I’ve decided to help you—you were the only one who loved my little beauties, the only one who never meant us any harm….”

  Evening

  The last. It is nothing. I follow the brown back of my guide through the shadowy maze, always steering away from the swamps and tangles, sticking to high ground. The cat man has elected to stay behind, gone feral (once an ass, always an ass). Soured on civilization, he says, by his late experience. We have had a long talk. He whimpered and sputtered. Told me of his childhood, his morbid sensitivity—marked at birth, an outcast. He’s suffered all his life, and the experience with the downed plane brought it all home. The Txukahameis (that was his name for them) were different. Noble savages. They found him wandering, took him in, marveled over the beauty of his face, appointed him demichief, exacted his vengeance for him. There was a lot to like about them, he said. Home cooking. Sexual rites. Pet ocelots. No way he was leaving. But he wished me luck.

  And so I follow the brown back. Five or six hours, and then I begin to detect it—faint and distant—the chuff and stutter of a diesel. Bulldozers, two or three of them. We draw closer, the noise swells. Step by step. I can smell the exhaust. Then my guide points in the direction of the blatting engines, parts the fronds, and vanishes.

  I hurry for the building road, my blood churning, a smile cracking my lips—yes, I am thinking, the moment I step from the bush I’ll be a celebrity. In a month I’ll be rich. Talk shows, interviews, newspapers, magazines—a book, a film. (Birds caw, my feet rush, the bulldozers roar.) I can picture the book jacket … my face, jungle backdrop … title in red … Survivor I’ll call it—or Alive … no, something with more flair, more gut appeal, something dramatic, something with suffering in it. Something like—Green Hell.

  (1976)

  ME CAGO EN LA LECHE (ROBERT JORDAN IN NICARAGUA)

  “So tell me, comrade, why do you wear your hair this way?”

  Robert Jordan fingered the glistening, rock-hard corona of his spiked hair (dyed mud-brown now, with khaki highlights, for the sake of camouflage) and then loosened the cap of his flask and took a long burning hit of mescal. He waited till the flame was gone from his throat and the familiar glow lit his insides so that they felt radioactive, then leaned over the campfire to address the flat-faced old man in worn fatigues. “Because I shit in the milk of my mother, that’s why,” he said, the mescal abrading his voice. He caressed the copper stud that lay tight against the flange of his left nostril and wiped his hands with exaggerated care on his Hussong’s T-shirt. “And come to think of it,” he added, “because I shit in the milk of your mother too.”

  The old man, flat-faced though he was, said nothing. He wasn’t that old, actually—twenty-eight or -nine, Robert Jordan guessed—but poor nutrition, lack of dental care, and too much squinting into the sun gave him the look of a retired caterer in Miami Beach. The fire snapped, monkeys howled. “La reputa que lo parió,” the old man said finally, turning his head to spit.

  Robert Jordan didn’t catch it all—he’d dropped out of college in the middle of Interme
diate Spanish—but he got the gist of it all right and gave the old man the finger. “Yeah,” he said, “and screw you too.”

  Two nights earlier the old man had come to him in the Managua bus station as he gingerly lifted his two aluminum-frame superlightweight High Sierra mountain packs down from the overhead rack and exited the bus that had brought him from Mexico City. The packs were stuffed with soiled underwear, granola bars, hair gel, and plastic explosives, and Robert Jordan was suffering from a hangover. He was also suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea, and dehydration, not to mention the general debilitating effects of having spent two days and a night on a third-class bus with a potpourri of drunks, chicken thieves, disgruntled pigs, and several dozen puking, mewling, loose-bowled niñitos. “Over here, comrade,” the old man had whispered, taking him by the arm and leading him to a bench across the square.

  The old man had hovered over him as Robert Jordan threw himself down on the bench and stretched his legs. Trucks rumbled by, burros brayed, campesinos hurried about their business. “You are the gringo for this of the Cup of Soup, no?” the old man asked.

  Robert Jordan regarded him steadily out of the slits of his bloodshot eyes. The old man’s face was as dry and corrugated as a strip of jerky and he wore the armband of the Frente, black letters—FSLN—against a red background. Robert Jordan was thinking how good the armband would look with his Dead Kennedys tour jacket, but he’d caught the “Cup of Soup” business and nodded. That nod was all the old man needed. He broke into a grin, bent to kiss him on both cheeks, and breathed rummy fumes in his face. “I am called Bayardo,” the old man said, “and I am come to take you to the border.”

  Robert Jordan felt bone-weary, but this was what he’d come for, so he stood and shouldered one of the packs while Bayardo took the other. In a few minutes they’d be boarding yet another bus, this one north to Jinotega and the Honduran border that lay beyond it. There Robert Jordan would rendezvous with one of the counter-counter-revolutionary bands (Contra Contra) and he would, if things went well, annihilate in a roar of flying earth clods and shattered trees a Contra airstrip and warehouse where foodstuffs—Twinkies, Lipton Cup of Soup, and Rice Krispies among them—were flown in from Texas by the CIA. Hence the codename, “Cup of Soup.”

  But now—now they were camped somewhere on the Nicaraguan side of the border, listening to monkeys howl and getting their asses chewed off by mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, leeches, and everything else that crawled, swam, or flew. It began to rain. The rain, Robert Jordan understood, would be bad for his hair. He finished a granola bar, exchanged curses with the old man, and crawled into his one-man pup tent. “You take the first watch,” he growled through the wall of undulating nylon in his very bad Spanish. “And the second and third too. Come to think of it, why don’t you just wake me at noon.”

  The camp was about what you’d expect, Robert Jordan thought, setting his pack down in a clump of poisonous-looking plants. He and the old man had hiked three days through the bug factory to get here, and what was it but a few banana-leaf hovels with cigarette cartons piled outside. Robert Jordan was thinking he’d be happy to blow this dump and get back to the drugs, whores, semi-clean linen, and tequila añejo of Mexico City and points north, when a one-eyed man emerged from the near hut, his face split with a homicidal grin. His name was Ruperto, and he wore the combat boots, baggy camouflage pants, and black T-shirt that even professors in Des Moines favored these days, and he carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his right hand. “Qué tal, old man,” he said, addressing Bayardo, and then, turning to Robert Jordan and speaking in English: “And this is the gringo with the big boom-boom. Nice hair, gringo.”

  Robert Jordan traded insults with him, ending with the usual malediction about shit, milk, and mothers, and then pinched his voice through his nose in the nagging whine he’d perfected when he was four. “And so where’s all the blow that’s supposed to be dropping from the trees out here, huh? And what about maybe a hit of rum or some tortillas or something? I mean I been tramping through this craphole for three days and no sooner do I throw my pack down than I get some wiseass comment about my hair I could’ve stayed in Montana and got from some redneck cowboy. Hey,” he shouted, leaning into Ruperto’s face and twisting his voice till it broke in a snarl, “screw you too, Jack.”

  Ruperto said nothing. Just smiled his homicidal smile, one eye gleaming, the other dead in a crater of pale, scarred flesh. By now the others had begun to gather—Robert Jordan counted six of them, flat-faced Indians all—and a light rain was sizzling through the trees. “You want hospitality,” Ruperto said finally, “go to Howard Johnson’s.” He spat at his feet. “Your mother,” he said, and then turned to shout over his shoulder. “Muchacha!”

  Everyone stopped dead to watch as the girl in skintight fatigues stepped out of the hut, shadowed by an older woman with the build of a linebacker. “Sí?” the girl said in a voice that inflamed Robert Jordan’s groin.

  Ruperto spat again. “Bring the gringo some chow.”

  “The Cup of Soup?” the girl asked.

  Ruperto winked his mad wet eye at Robert Jordan. “Sí,” he grunted, “the Cup of Soup.”

  As he lay in his pup tent that night, his limbs entwined in the girl’s—her name was either Vidaluz or Concepción, he couldn’t remember which—Robert Jordan thought of his grandmother. She was probably the only person in the world he didn’t hate. His mother was a real zero, white wine and pasta salad all the way, and his friends back in Missoula were a bunch of dinks who thought Bryan Adams was god. His father was dead. When the old man had sucked on the barrel of his 30.06 Winchester, Robert was fourteen and angry. His role model was Sid Vicious and he was into glue and Bali Hai. It was his grandmother—she was Andalusian, really cool, a guerrilla who’d bailed out of Spain in the ‘30s, pregnant with Robert Jordan II—who listened patiently to his gripes about the school jocks and his wimpy teachers and bought him tire chains to wrap around his boots. They sat for hours together listening to the Clash’s Sandinista album, and when he blew off the tips of his pinky and ring fingers with a homemade bomb, it was she who gave him his first pair of studded black leather gloves. And what was best about her—what he liked more than anything else—was that she didn’t take any shit from anybody. Once, when her third husband, Joe Thunderbucket, called her “Little Rabbit,” she broke his arm in three places. It was she more than anyone who’d got him into all this revolution business—she and the Clash, anyway. And of course, he’d always loved dynamite.

  He lay there, slapping mosquitoes, his flesh sticky against the girl’s, wondering what his grandmother was doing now, in the dark of this night before his first offensive. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? That was bingo night on the reservation, and she usually went with Joe’s sister Leona to punch numbers and drink boiler-makers at the bingo hall. He pictured her in her black mantilla, her eyes cold and hard and lit maybe a little with the bourbon and Coors, and then he woke up Concepción or Vidaluz and gave it to her again, all his anger focused in the sharp tingling stab and rhythm of it.

  It was still dark when the old man woke him. “Son of a bitch,” Robert Jordan muttered. His hair was crushed like a Christmas-tree ornament and there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t mind fighting for the revolution, but this was ridiculous—it wasn’t even light yet. “Ándale,” the old man said, “the Cup of Soup awaits.”

  Are you out of your gourd, or what?” Robert Jordan twisted free of the girl and checked his watch. “It’s four-fifteen, for Christ’s sake.”

  The old man shrugged. “Qué puta es la guerra,” he said. “War’s a bitch.”

  And then the smell of woodsmoke and frijoles came to him over Ruperto’s high crazed whinny of a laugh, the girl was up and out of his sleeping bag, strolling heavy-haunched and naked across the clearing, and Robert Jordan was reaching for his hair gel.

  After breakfast—two granola bars and a tin plate of frijoles that looked and tasted like humus—Robert Jordan
vomited in the weeds. He was going into battle for the first time and he didn’t have the stomach for it. This wasn’t like blowing the neighbors’ garbage cans at 2:00 A.M. or ganging up on some jerk in a frat jacket, this was the real thing. And what made it worse was that they couldn’t just slip up in the dark, attach the plastique with a timer, and let it rip when they were miles away—oh, no, that would be too simple. His instructions, carried by the old man from none other than Ruy Ruiz, the twenty-three-year-old Sandinista poet in charge of counter-counter-revolutionary activities and occasional sestinas, were to blow it by hand the moment the cargo plane landed. Over breakfast, Robert Jordan, angry though he was, had begun to understand that there was more at risk here than his coiffure. There could be shooting. Rocket fire. Grenades. A parade of images from all the schlock horror films he’d ever seen—exploding guts, melting faces, ragged ghouls risen from the grave—marched witheringly through his head and he vomited.

  “Hey, gringo,” Ruperto called in English, “suck up your cojones and let’s hit it.”

  Robert Jordan cursed him weakly with a barrage of shits and milks, but when he turned round to wipe the drool from his face he saw that Ruperto and his big woman had led a cluster of horses from the jungle. The big woman, her bare arms muscled like a weightlifter’s, approached him leading a gelding the size of a buffalo. “Here, gringo,” she breathed in her incongruously feminine voice, “mount up.”

  “Mount?” Robert Jordan squeaked in growing panic. “I thought we were walking.”

  The truth was, Robert Jordan had always hated horses. Growing up in Montana it was nothing but horses, horses, horses, morning, noon, and night. Robert Jordan was a rebel, a punk, a free spirit—he was no cowboy dildo—and for him it was dirt bikes and dune buggies. He’d been on horseback exactly twice in his life and both times he’d been thrown. Horses: they scared him. Anything with an eye that big—