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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  That was when the elephant gave a sudden lurch and swung around amidst the shattered bamboo and the tatters of thatch to face me head-on. Boom: it happened in an instant. There the thing was, fifty feet away—four quick elephantine strides—stinking and titanic, staggering from one foot to the other like one of the street people you see on the sidewalks of San Francisco or New York. It seemed perplexed, as if it couldn’t remember what it was doing there with all that wreckage scattered around it—and I had to credit the beer for that. Those fermenting tubs hold something like fifty gallons each, and that’s a lot of beer by anybody’s standards, even an elephant’s. The smallest ray of hope stirred in me—maybe, if I just stood rock still, the thing wouldn’t see me. Or couldn’t. Maybe it would just stagger into the jungle to sleep it off and I could save face by blowing a couple shots over its retreating butt.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  The unreadable red-rimmed eyes seemed to seize on me and the thing threw back its head with one of those maniacal trumpeting blasts we all recognize, anybody who’s got a TV anyway, and then, quite plainly berserk, it came for me. I’d like to say I stood my ground, calmly pumping off round after round until the thing dropped massively at my feet, but that didn’t happen either. All at once my legs felt light again, as if they weren’t legs at all but things shaped out of air, and I dropped the gun and ran like I’d never run before in my life. And the crowd—all those irate Garo tribesmen, Dak and Candi and Poonam and whoever else was crazy enough to be out there watching this little slice of drama—they turned and ran too, but of course they had a good head start on me, and even if I’d just come off a first-place finish in the hundred meters at the Olympics, the elephant would have caught up to me in a heartbeat and transformed me into a section of roadway and all the money my parents had laid out on orthodontics and tuition and just plain food would have been for naught. I hadn’t gone ten paces before an errant fragment of thatch roof caught hold of my foot and down I went, expecting imminent transformation (or pancakeization, as Poonam later phrased it, and I didn’t think it was that funny, believe me).

  The elephant had been trumpeting madly but suddenly the high notes shot right off the scale and I lifted my fragile head to see what I at first thought was some sort of giant black snake cavorting with the thing. I’ll tell you, the elephant was lively now, dancing right up off its toes as if it wanted to fly away. It took a moment to come together for me: that was no snake—that was the high-voltage cable and that thing at the other end of it was the snapped-off, bobbing remnant of a high-resin-compound utility pole. The dance was energetic, almost high-spirited, but it was over in an instant, and when the thing came down—the elephant, big as an eighteen-wheeler—the ground shook as if a whole city had collapsed.

  There was dust everywhere. The cable whipped and sparked. I heard the crowd roar and reverse itself, a hundred feet pounding at the dirt, and then, in the midst of it all, there was that scream again, the one I’d heard in the night; it was like someone slipping a knife up under my ribcage and twisting it. My gaze leapt past the hulk of the elephant, past the ruin of the village and the pall of smoke, to the shadowy architecture of the jungle. And there it was, the spotted thing, crouching on all fours with its eyes fastened on me, raging yellow, raging, until it rose on two legs and vanished.

  (2004)

  The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight’s Journey to New York, 1702

  Boston to Dedham

  The road was dark, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn’t have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead. Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone. Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount’s hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea. Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive. The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed. She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself. She’d talked till her throat went dry as they’d left town in the declining sun and he’d done his best to keep up though he wasn’t naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they’d fallen silent. She resigned herself. Rode on. And just as she’d given up hope, a light appeared ahead.

  At Dedham

  Robert her cousin leaving her to await the Post at the cottage of the Reverend and Madam Belcher before turning round for Boston with a dozen admonitions on his lips—She should have gone by sea as there was no telling what surprises lay ahead on the road in that savage country and she was to travel solely with trusted companions and the Post, et cetera—she settled in by the fire with a cup of tea and explained her business to Madam Belcher in her cap and the Reverend with his pipe. Yes, she felt responsible. And yes, it was she who’d introduced her boarder, a young widow, to her kinsman, Caleb Trowbridge, only to have him die four months after the wedding and leave the poor woman twice widowed. There were matters of the estate to be settled in both New Haven and New York, and it was her intention to act in the widow’s behalf, being a widow herself and knowing how cruel such divisions of property can be.

  An old dog lay on the rug. A tallow candle held a braided flame above it. There was a single ornament on the wall, a saying out of the Bible in needlepoint: He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth. After a pause, the Reverend’s wife asked if she would like another cup.

  Sarah’s eyes rose from the fire to the black square of the window. “You’re very kind,” she said, “but no thank you.” She was concerned about the Post. Shouldn’t he have been here by now? Had she somehow managed to miss him? Because if she had, there was no sense in going on—she might just as well admit defeat and find a guide back to Boston in the morning. “But where can the Post be?” she asked, turning to the Reverend.

  The Reverend was a big block of a man with a nose to support the weight of his fine-ground spectacles. He cleared his throat. “Might be he’s gone on to the Billingses, where he’s used to lodge.”

  She listened to the hiss of the water trapped in a birch stick on the fire. Her whole body ached with the soreness of the saddle. “And how far would that be?”

  “Twelve mile on.”

  At Dedham Tavern

  She sat in a corner in her riding clothes while the Reverend brought the hostess to her, the boards of the floor unswept, tobacco dragons putting their claws into the air and every man with a black cud of chew in his mouth. The woman came to her with her hair in a snarl and her hands patting at her hips, open-faced and wondering. The Reverend stood beside her with his nose and his spectacles, the crown of his hat poking into the timbers overhead. Could she be of assistance?

  “Yes, I’d like some refreshment, if you please. And I’ll need a guide to take me as far as the Billingses’ to meet up with the Post.”

  “The Billingses? At this hour of night?”

  The hostess had raised her voice so that every soul in the place could appreciate the clear and irrefragable reason of what she was saying, and she went on to point out that it was twelve miles in the dark and that there would be none there to take her, but that her son John, if the payment was requisite to his risking life and limb, might be induced to go. Even at this unholy hour.

  And where was John?

  “You never mind. Just sta
te your price.”

  Madam Knight sat as still as if she were in her own parlor with her mother and daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge and her two boarders gathered round her. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face that had once been pretty, and though she was plump and her hands were soft, she was used to work and to hard-dealing and she was no barmaid in a country tavern. She gazed calmly on the hostess and said nothing.

  “Two pieces of eight,” the woman said. “And a dram.”

  A moment passed, every ear in the place attuned to the sequel. “I will not be accessory to such extortion,” Sarah pronounced in an even voice, “not if I have to find my own way, alone and defenseless in the dark.”

  The hostess went on like a singing Quaker, mounting excuse atop argument, and the men stopped chewing and held the pewter mugs arrested in their hands, until finally an old long-nosed cadaver who looked to be twice the hostess’s age rose up from the near table and asked how much she would pay him to show her the way.

  Sarah was nonplussed. “Who are you?”

  “John,” he said, and jerked a finger toward the hostess. “’Er son.”

  Dedham to the Billingses’

  If the road had been dark before, now it was as if she were blind and afflicted and the horse blind too. Clouds had rolled in to pull a shade over the stars and planets while she’d sat listening to the hostess at the tavern, and if it weren’t for the sense of hearing and the feel of a damp breeze on her face, she might as well have been locked in a closet somewhere. John was just there ahead of her, as Cousin Robert had been earlier, but John was a talker and the strings of his sentences pulled her forward like a spare set of reins. Like his mother, he was a monologuist. His subject was himself and the myriad dangers of the road—savage Indians, catamounts, bears, wolves and common thieves—he’d managed to overthrow by his own cunning and heroism in the weeks and months just recently passed. “There was a man ’ere, on this very spot, murdered and drawn into four pieces by a Pequot with two brass rings in ’is ears,” he told her. “Rum was the cause of it. If I’d passed by an hour before it would have been me.” And: “The catamount’s a wicked thing. Gets a horse by the nostrils and then rakes out the innards with ’is hinder claws. I’ve seen it myself.” And again: “Then you’ve got your shades of the murdered. When the wind is down you hear them hollowin’ at every crossroads.”

  She wasn’t impressed. They’d hanged women for witches in her time, and every corner, even in town, seemed to be the haunt of one goblin or another. Stories and wives’ tales, legends to titillate the children before bed. There were real dangers in the world, dangers here in the dark, but they were overhead and underfoot, the nagging branch and open gully, the horse misstepping and coming down hard on her, the invisible limb to brain her as she levitated by, but she tried not to think of them, tried to trust in her guide—John the living cadaver—and the horse beneath her. She gripped the saddle and tried to ease the ache in her seat, which had radiated out to her limbs now and her backbone, even her neck, and she let her mind go numb with the night and the sweet released odors of the leaves they crushed underfoot.

  At the Billingses’

  She would never have known the house was there but for the sudden scent of wood smoke and the narrowest ribbon of light that hung in the void like the spare edge of something grander. “If you’ll just alight, then, Missus,” John was saying, and she could feel his hand at her elbow to help her down, “and take yourself right on through that door there.”

  “What door?”

  “There. Right before your face.”

  He led her forward even as the horses stamped in their impatience to be rid of the saddle. She felt stone beneath her feet and focused on the ribbon of light till the door fell inward and she was in the room itself, low beams, plank floor, a single lantern and the fire dead in the hearth. In the next instant a young woman of fifteen or so rose up out of the inglenook with a contorted face and demanded to know who she was and what she was doing in her house at such an hour. The girl stood with her legs apart, as if ready to defend herself. Her voice was strained. “I never seen a woman on the road so dreadful late. Who are you? Where are you going? You scared me out of my wits.”

  “This is a lodging house, or am I mistaken?” Sarah drew herself up, sorer than she’d ever been in her life, the back of a horse—any horse—like the Devil’s own rack, and all she wanted was a bed, not provender, not company, not even civility—just that: a bed.

  “My ma’s asleep,” the girl said, standing her ground. “So’s my pa. And William too.”

  “It’s William I’ve come about. He’s the Post, isn’t he?”

  “I suspect.”

  “Well, I’ll be traveling west with him in the morning and I’ll need a bed for the night. You do have a bed?” Even as she said it she entertained a vision of sleeping rough, stretched out on the cold ground amidst the dried-out husks of the fallen leaves, prey to anything that stalked or crept, and she felt all the strength go out of her. She never pleaded. It wasn’t in her nature. But she was slipping fast when the door suddenly opened behind her and John stepped into the room.

  The girl’s eyes ran to him. “Lawful heart, John, is it you?” she cried, and then it was all right, and she offered a chair and a biscuit and darted away upstairs only to appear a moment later with three rings on her fingers and her hair brushed back from her brow. And then the chattering began, one topic flung down as quickly as the next was taken up, and all Sarah wanted was that bed, which finally she found in a little back lean-to that wasn’t much bigger than the bedstead itself. As for comfort, the bed was like a mound of bricks, the shuck mattress even worse. No matter. Exhaustion overcame her. She undressed and slid in under the counterpane even as the bed lice stole out for the feast.

  The Billingses’ to Foxvale

  She arose stiff in the morning, feeling as if she’d been pounded head to toe with the flat head of a mallet, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. But William was there, scooping porridge out of a bowl by the fire, and the mistress of the house. Sarah made her own introductions, paid for her bed, a mug of coffee that scalded her palate, and her own wooden bowl of porridge, and then she climbed back into the rack of the saddle and they were gone by eight in the morning.

  The country they passed through rolled one way and the other, liberally partitioned by streams, creeks, freshets and swamps, the hooves of the horses eternally flinging up ovals of black muck that smelled of things dead and buried. There were birds in the trees still, though the summer flocks were gone, and every branch seemed to hold a squirrel or chipmunk. The leaves were in color, the dragonflies glazed and hovering over the shadows in the road ahead, and in the clearings goldenrod nodding bright on a thousand stalks. For the first time she found herself relaxing, settling into the slow-haunching rhythm of the horse as she followed the Post’s back and the swishing tail of his mount through one glade after another. There were no houses, no people. She heard a gabbling in the forest and saw the dark-clothed shapes there—turkeys, in all their powers and dominions, turkeys enough to feed all of Boston—and she couldn’t help thinking of the basted bird in a pan over the fire.

  At first she’d tried to make conversation with William (a man in his twenties, kempt, lean as a pole, taciturn) just to be civil, but talk seemed superfluous out here in the wild and she let her thoughts wander as if she were at prayer or drifting through the mutating moments before sleep comes. You should have gone by sea, Cousin Robert had said, and he was right of course, except that the rollicking of the waters devastated her—she’d been once with her father in a dinghy to Nantucket when she was a girl, and once was enough. She could still remember the way her stomach heaved and the fear she’d felt of the implacable depths where unseen things—leviathan, the shark, the crab and suckerfish—rolled in darkness. She’d never learned to swim. Why would she, living in town, and when even the water of the lakes and the river was like the
breath of mid-winter, and the sea worse, far worse, with men falling overboard from the fishing boats and drowning from the shock of it? No, she would keep the solid earth under her feet. Or her horse’s feet, at any rate.

  Sure progress, the crown of the day: there was the sun, the solemn drapery of the forest, birdsong. She was lulled, half asleep, expecting nothing but more of the same, when suddenly a small thicket of trees detached itself from the wood and ambled out into the road so that her mount pulled up and flung its near eye back at her. It took two catapulting moments for the image to jell, and then she let out a scream that was the only human sound for twenty miles around.

  The thing—the walking forest—was bearded and antlered and had eyes that shone like the Indian money they made of shells. It produced a sound of its own—a blunt bewildered bleat of alarm—and then it was gone and William, taciturn William, was there at her side. “It’s nothing to worry yourself over,” he said, and she saw that he was grinning as if he’d just heard a joke—or formulated one. He had a story to tell at the tavern that night, that’s what it was, and she was the brunt of it, the widow from Boston who wouldn’t recognize a—what was it, a moose?—if it came right up and grazed out of her hand.

  At Foxvale