T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I was so intent on watching her eat I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the disc jockey came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it and make it happy in its new home—no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing her makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She was bent over the couch now, stuffing things into her purse.

  “You look terrific,” I said.

  There was a sound from the bedroom then, a low moan that might have been the expiring gasp of the cat’s prey and I wondered if it had found something in there, a rat, a stray bird attracted to the window, an escaped hamster or lizard. “Listen, Junior,” she said, ignoring the moaning, which grew higher and more attenuated now, “you’re a nice guy, you really are.”

  I was behind the Formica counter. My hands were in the dishwater. Something pounded in my head and I knew what was coming, heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she ducked her head and averted her eyes.

  “I can’t—I have to tell you something, okay? Because you’re sweet, you are, and I want to be honest with you.”

  She raised her face to me all of a sudden, let her eyes stab at mine and then dodge away again. “I have a boyfriend. He’s away at school. And I don’t know why . . . I mean, I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression. It was nice. It was.”

  The moaning cut off abruptly on a rising note. I didn’t know what to say—I was new at this, new and useless. Suddenly I was desperate, looking for anything, any stratagem, the magic words that would make it all right again. “The cat,” I said. “What about the cat?”

  Her voice was soft. “He’ll be all right. Just feed him. Be nice to him.” She was at the door, the purse slung over one shoulder. “Patience,” she said, “that’s all it takes. A little patience.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Will I see you later?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  —

  As soon as her pickup pulled out of the lot, I called my boss. He answered on the first ring, raising his voice to be heard over the ambient noise. I could hear the tile saw going in the background, the irregular banging of a hammer, the radio tuned to some jittery rightwing propagandist. “I want to come in,” I said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Junior.”

  “Monday, Monday at the earliest.”

  I told him I was going crazy cooped up in my apartment, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “What is it?” he said. “Money? Because I’ll advance you on next week if you really need it, though it’ll mean a trip to the bank I wasn’t planning on. Which is a pain in the ass. But I’ll do it. Just say the word.”

  “No, it’s not the money, it’s just—”

  He cut me off. “Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? Didn’t I tell you to go out and get yourself laid? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing at your age. It’s what I’d be doing.”

  “Can’t I just, I don’t know, help out?”

  “Monday,” he said.

  I was angry suddenly and I slammed the phone down. My eyes went to the hole cut in the bedroom door and then to the breakfast plates, egg yolk congealing there in bright yellow stripes, the muffin, Daria’s muffin, untouched but for a single neat bite cut out of the round. It was Friday. I hated my life. How could I have been so stupid?

  There was no sound from the bedroom, and as I laced my sneakers I fought down the urge to go to the peephole and see what the cat had accomplished in the night—I just didn’t want to think about it. Whether it had vanished like the bad odor of a bad dream or chewed through the wall and devoured the neighbor’s yapping little dogs or broken loose and smuggled itself onto a boat back to Africa, it was all the same to me. The only thing I did know was that there was no way I was going to attempt to feed that thing on my own, not without Daria there. It could starve for all I cared, starve and rot.

  Eventually, I fished a jean jacket out of a pile of clothes on the floor and went down to the beach. The day was overcast and a cold wind out of the east scoured the sand. I must have walked for hours and then, for lack of anything better to do, I went to a movie, after which I had a sandwich at a new place downtown where the college students were rumored to hang out. There were no students there as far as I could see, just old men who looked exactly like the regulars at Daggett’s, and they had their square-shouldered old wives with them and their squalling unhappy children. By four I hit my first bar, and by six I was drunk.

  I tried to stay away from Daggett’s—Give her a day or two, I told myself, don’t nag, don’t be a burden—but at quarter of nine I found myself at the bar, ordering a Jack-and-Coke from Chris. Chris gave me a look, and everything had changed since yesterday. “You sure?” he said.

  I asked him what he meant.

  “You look like you’ve had enough, buddy.”

  I craned my neck to look for Daria, but all I saw were the regulars, hunched over their drinks. “Just pour,” I said.

  The music was there like a persistent annoyance, dead music, ancient, appreciated by no one, not even the regulars. It droned on. Chris set down my drink and I lifted it to my lips. “Where’s Daria?” I asked.

  “She got off early. Said she was tired. Slow night, you know?”

  I felt a stab of disappointment, jealousy, hate. “You have a number for her?”

  Chris gave me a wary look, because he knew something I didn’t. “You mean she didn’t give you her number?”

  “No,” I said, “we never—well, she was at my house . . .”

  “We can’t give out personal information.”

  “To me? I said she was at my house. Last night. I need to talk to her, and it’s urgent—about the cat. She’s really into the cat, you know?”

  “Sorry.”

  I threw it back at him. “You’re sorry? Well, fuck you—I’m sorry too.”

  “You know what, buddy—”

  “Junior, the name’s Junior.”

  He leaned into the bar, both arms propped before him, and in a very soft voice he said, “I think you better leave now.”

  —

  It had begun to rain, a soft patter in the leaves that grew steadier and harder as I walked home. Cars went by on the boulevard with the sound of paper tearing, and they dragged whole worlds behind them. The streetlights were dim. There was nobody out. When I came up the hill to my apartment I saw the Mustang standing there under the carport, and though I’d always been averse to drinking and driving—a lesson I’d learned from my father’s hapless example—I got behind the wheel and drove up to the jobsite with a crystalline clarity that would have scared me in any other state of mind. There was an aluminum ladder there, and I focused on that—the picture of it lying against the building—till I arrived and hauled it out of the mud and tied it to the roof of the car without a thought for the paint job or anything else.

  When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with the overzealous knots I’d tied until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around the back of the apartment. I was drunk, yes, but cautious too—if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an
apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have gotten difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited there in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.

  I didn’t want to go in the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat of that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark till I fell asleep.

  In the morning—there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain—I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage—a den, a makeshift den—and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must be gone, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then—and I don’t know why—I pulled the door shut behind me.

  (2003)

  Almost Shooting an Elephant

  So we went in there with Meghalaya Cable, a subsidiary of Verizon (don’t ask, because I couldn’t begin to tell you: just think multinational, that’s all), and put in the grid so these people could have color TV and DSL hookups in their huts, and I brought a couple rifles with me. I like to hunt, all right? So crucify me. I grew up in Iowa, in Ottumwa, and it was a rare day when I didn’t bring something home for my mother, whether it was ringneck or rabbit or even a gopher or muskrat, which are not bad eating if you stew them up with tomatoes and onions, and plus you get your fur. I had to pay an excess baggage charge, which the company declined to pick up, but there was no way I was going to India without my guns. Especially since this leg of the project was in the West Garo Hills, where they still have the kind of jungle they had in Kipling’s day. Or at least remnants of it.

  Anyway, it was my day off and I was lying up in my tent, slapping mosquitoes and leafing through a back issue of Guns & Ammo, the birds screeching in the trees, the heat delivering one knockout punch after another till I could barely hold my head up. I wouldn’t say I was bored—I was putting in a six-day workweek stringing wire to one ramshackle village after another, and just to lie there and feel the cot give under my bones was a luxury. Still, it felt as if the hands of my watch hadn’t moved in the last hour and as I drifted in and out of sleep the birds always seemed to be hitting the same note. I tried to relax, enjoy the moment and the magazine, but I was only waiting for the heat to let up so I could take my .22 and a jar of the local rice beer down the hill to the swamp and see what was stirring in the bushes.

  I was studying the ads in the back of the magazine—a party in Wishbone, Montana, was offering a classic Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine with a Monte Carlo stock for sale or trade, a weapon I would have killed for—when I heard the sound of footsteps approaching on the path up from the village. Flip-flops. You could hear them a mile away, a slap, a shuffle, another slap, and then a quick burst: slap, slap, slap. There was a pause and I felt the bamboo platform rock ever so slightly.

  The birds stopped screeching, all at once, as if the point of contention, whatever it was, had slipped their bird brains. A smell of meat roasting over the open fire came wafting up the hill on the first hint of an evening breeze. In the sudden hush I heard the frogs belching in the ditch behind me and the faintest thumping strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” from a radio in one of the other tents. “Randall? You in there?” came a voice just outside the front flap.

  This was a female voice, and my hope (notwithstanding the fact that I was, and am, totally attached to Jenny, who I’m saving to buy a condo with in Des Moines) was that it was Poonam. Poonam was from Bombay, she wore tight jeans and little knit blouses that left her midriff bare, and she was doing her Ph.D. thesis on the Garos and their religious beliefs. She’d been waiting for me with a bottle of gin and a plate of curry when I got off work two days earlier, and I have to admit that the sound of her voice—she spoke very softly, so you had to strain to hear—put me in a sort of trance that wouldn’t seem to let up, and I’d begun to entertain thoughts about what she might look like without the jeans and blouse. All she could talk about was her research, of course, and that was fine by me, because with the gin and the curry and the sweet, soft music of her voice she could have been lecturing on the Bombay sewer system and I would have been rooted to the spot. (And what did the Garos believe in? Well, they called themselves Christians—they’d been converted under the British Raj—but in actuality they were animists, absolutely dead certain that spirits inhabited the trees, the earth, the creatures of the forest, and that those spirits were just about universally evil. That is, life was shit—rats in the granaries, elephants obliterating the fields, kraits and cobras killing the children the leopards hadn’t made off with, floods and droughts and diseases that didn’t even have names—and whoever was responsible for it had to be as malicious as a whole squad of devils.)

  So I said, “Yeah, I’m here,” expecting Poonam, expecting gin, religion, and a sweet little roll of belly flesh I could almost taste with the tip of a stiff tongue going south, and who should part the flaps but Candi Berkee, my co-worker from New Jersey whose presence there, in my tent in the West Garo Hills, was a real testimony to Verizon’s commitment to equal-opportunity employment.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “’S up?” I said.

  She gave a sort of full-body shrug, her lips crushed together under the weight of her nose and the Matrix-style shades that never left her face, then ducked through the flaps and flopped down in my camp chair. Which was piled high with six or seven sedimentary layers of used socks, underwear, and T-shirts I refrained from tossing on the floor for fear of what might end up living inside them. “I don’t know,” she said, dropping her face as if she were emptying a pan of dishwater, “I’m just bored. This is a boring place. The most boring place in the world. Number one. Know what I mean?”

  It wasn’t that she was unattractive—bodywise, she was off the charts—but there was something about her that irritated me, and it went beyond her unrelenting whining about the heat, the mosquitoes, the food, the tedium, and anything else she could think of. For one thing, she was a militant vegetarian who regarded anyone who even thought of hunting as the lowest of the low, a step below the average Al Qaeda terrorist (“At least they believe in something”). For another, her taste in music—Britney, Whitney, and Mariah—was as pathetic as you could get. The fact that she was in my tent was a strong indicator that everybody else must have gone into Tura, the nearest excuse for a city. Either that or committed suicide.

  I didn’t respond. The cot cupped my bones. She was wearing shorts and a bikini top, and there was a bright sheen of sweat on her exposed flesh that made her look as if she’d been greased for the flagpole event at the county fair. The birds started in again: screech, screech, screech.

  “You want to smoke out?”

  She knew I had pot. I knew she had pot. Everybody had pot. The whole country was made out of it. I was about to beg off on the grounds that I had to keep my senses sharp for putting b
ullets into whatever might be creeping down to the river to sneak a drink, be it muntjac or macaque, but thought better of it—I was in no mood for a lecture. “Nah,” I said finally, sucking all the enthusiasm out of my voice. “I don’t think so. Not today.”

  “Why not?” She shoved her sweat-limp hair out of her eyes and gave me an accusatory look. “Come on, don’t be a pussy. Help me out here. I’m bored. Did I tell you that? Bored with a capital B.”

  I don’t know whether the birds cut off before or after the sound of a second pair of flip-flops came to me, but there it was—the slap, the shuffle, and then the give of the bamboo floor. “Hello?” Poonam’s voice. “Hello, Randall?”

  Poonam wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see Candi there, and for her part, Candi wasn’t too thrilled either. I’d been up front with both of them about Jenny, but when you’re away from home and affection long enough, strange things begin to happen, and I suppose hunting can only take you so far. As a distraction, that is.

  “Oh . . . hi,” Poonam murmured, shifting her eyes from me to Candi and back again. “I was just—” She looked down at the floor. “I was just coming for Randall, because the Wangala celebration is about to begin, or the drumming anyway—we won’t see the dancing till tomorrow, officially—and I wondered if, well” (up came the eyes, full and bright, like high beams on a dark country road), “if you wanted to come with me to the village and see what they’re doing—the ritual, I mean. Because it’s, well, I find it stimulating. And I think you would too, Randall.” She turned to Candi then, because Poonam was graceful and pretty and she had manners to spare. “And you too, Candi. You’re welcome too.”

  —

  I’m no expert, but from what Poonam told me, the Garos have a number of celebrations during the year, no different from the puffed-up Christians of Ottumwa and environs, and this one—Wangala—was a harvest festival. Think Thanksgiving, but a whole lot more primitive. Or maybe “rootsier” is a better word. Who are we thanking? God, supposedly, but in Ottumwa, it’s more like Walmart or Hy-Vee. The Garos, on the other hand, are doing obeisance to Saljong, god of fertility, who provides nature’s bounty in the forms of crops and fish and game. Of course, Poonam never did tell me what they expected to happen if they didn’t give their abundant thanks to this particular god, but I could guess.