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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Some degree. He had no sense of shame, but then neither did Adam and Eve before the serpent came into the Garden, and how could he be blamed for that? Perhaps the most wrenching lessons Itard had felt compelled to give him were the ones designed to make him stretch beyond himself, to understand that other people had needs and emotions too, to feel pity and its corollary, compassion. Early on, when Victor was used to stealing and hoarding food in his room, Itard had tried to teach him a version of the Golden Rule in the most direct way he could think of—each time Victor filched some choice morsel from Itard’s plate or old Monsieur Guérin’s, Itard would wait his opportunity and swipe something back from Victor, even going so far as to slip into his room in his absence and remove his hoard of potatoes, apples and half-gnawed crusts of bread. Victor had reacted violently at first. The minute he turned his attention to his plate and saw that his pommes frites or broad beans were missing—that they were now on his teacher’s plate—he threw a tantrum, rolling on the floor and crying out in rage and pain. Madame Guérin made a face. Itard held firm. Over time, Victor eventually reformed—he no longer took food from others’ plates or misappropriated articles he coveted, a glittering shoe buckle or the translucent ball of glass Itard used as a paperweight—but the doctor could never be sure if it was because he’d developed a rudimentary sense of justice or, simply, that he feared reprisal in the way of the common criminal.

  That was what led the doctor, sometime during the third year of the boy’s education, to the most difficult lesson of all. It was on a day when they’d drilled with shapes for hours and Victor had been particularly tractable and looking forward to the usual blandishments and rewards Itard customarily gave him at the end of a trying session. The sun was sinking in the sky. Beyond the windows, the clamor of the deaf-mutes in the courtyard rose toward the release of dinnertime. The scent of stewing meat hung on the air. For several minutes now Victor had been looking up expectantly, awaiting the conclusion of the exercises and anticipating his reward. But instead of reward, Itard gave him punishment. He raised his voice, told Victor that he’d been bad, very bad, that he was clumsy and stupid and impossible to work with. For a long while he continued in this vein, then rose abruptly, seized the boy’s arm and led him to the closet where he’d been confined, as punishment, when he’d been particularly recalcitrant during the early days of his education.

  Victor gave him a look of bewilderment. He couldn’t fathom what he’d done wrong or why his teacher’s face was so contorted and red and his voice so threatening. At first, mewling plaintively, he let himself be led to the door of the closet, but then, as Itard was about to force him into it, Victor turned on him in outrage, his face flushed and his eyes flashing, and for a long moment they struggled for dominance. Victor was bigger now, stronger, but still he was no match for a grown man, and Itard was able to shove him, pleading and crying, into the closet. The door wouldn’t shut. Victor wouldn’t allow it. He braced his feet against the inside panel and pushed with all his strength and when he felt himself losing the battle he lurched forward suddenly to sink his teeth into Itard’s hand before the door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. It was an emotional moment for the doctor. His hand throbbed—he would have to treat the wound—and the boy would hate him for weeks, but he rejoiced all the same: Victor had developed a sense of justice. The punishment was undeserved and he’d reacted as any normal human being would have. Perhaps it was a small victory—would the Savage of Aveyron, dragged down from his tree, have grasped the concept?—but it was proof of Victor’s humanity and Itard included mention of it in his report. Such a child—such a young man—he argued in conclusion, was deserving of the attention of scientists and of the continued support and solicitude of the government.

  The report ran to fifty pages. The Minister of the Interior had it published at government expense, Sicard included with it a letter praising Itard’s efforts, and Itard received some measure of the recognition and celebrity he’d craved. But the experiment was over, officially, and Victor’s days at the Institute were numbered. Sicard militated for the boy’s removal, writing the Minister of the Interior to the effect that for all Itard’s heroic efforts the boy remained in a state of incurable idiocy, and that further he was a growing menace to the other students. It took some time—months and then years of depletion and vacancy—but eventually the government agreed to continue in perpetuity Madame Guérin’s annual stipend of one hundred fifty francs to care for Victor and to award her an additional five hundred francs to relocate, with her husband and the boy, to a small house around the corner from the Institute on the impasse des Feuillantines.

  —

  If Victor was at all affected by the move from the only home he’d known, from the room he’d occupied all this time and the grounds he’d roamed till he had every twig and leaf, furrow and rock memorized, he didn’t show it outwardly. He was a great help in moving the Guérins’ furnishings, and the new environment seemed to excite him so that he got down on all fours and sniffed at the baseboards of the walls and examined each of the rooms minutely, fascinated to see the familiar objects—his bed and counterpane, the pots and pans, the twin chairs the Guérins liked to pull up to the fire—arrayed in this new place. There wasn’t much of a yard, but it was free of deaf-mutes, and it was a place where he could study the sky or apply the axe and saw to the lengths of wood Madame Guérin required for the stove, where he could lie in the sun alongside Sultan, who had grown yet fatter and more ponderous as he aged. And each day, just as she’d done for years, Madame Guérin took him for a walk in the park.

  And Itard? He made an effort to visit, at least at first, and on hearing his voice, the boy would come running to him for a hug, and the reward—a bag of nuts or an orange—the doctor never failed to produce. Victor was in his twenties now, shorter than average—short as a child—but his face had broadened and he’d developed a rudimentary beard that furred his cheeks and descended as far as the scar on his throat. When he went out for his walks he still trotted along in his unique way, but around the house and the yard he began to shamble from place to place like an old man. Itard regarded the Guérins as old friends—almost as comrades in arms, as they’d all gone through a kind of war together—and Madame always insisted on cooking for him when he visited, but there was an awkwardness between him and his former pupil now, all the physical intimacy of their years together reduced to that initial hug. What was the point? What could they possibly say to each other? Victor spoke with his eyes, with certain rude gestures of his hands, but that was a vocabulary in which Itard was no longer interested. He was a busy man, in constant demand, his fame burgeoning, and with time his visits became less and less frequent until one day they stopped altogether.

  At the same time, the Guérins, now effectively retired from the Institute, were aging in a way that made it seem as if the weeks were months and the months years piled atop them. Monsieur Guérin, ten years his wife’s senior, fell ill. Victor hovered in the doorway of the sickroom, looking out of his neutral eyes, uncomprehending—or at least that was the way it seemed to Madame Guérin. The more her husband needed her, the more Victor seemed to regress. He demanded her attention. He tugged at her dress. Insisted that she come into the next room to fix him his pommes frites at any hour of the day, to pour him milk or massage his legs or simply to look and marvel at something he’d discovered, a spider making its web in the corner where the chimney met the ceiling, a bird perched on the windowsill that was gone by the time she turned her head. And then Monsieur Guérin was gone too and Victor stood bewildered over the coffin and shrank away from the strange faces gathered above it.

  The day after the funeral, Madame Guérin didn’t get out of bed until late in the afternoon and Victor spent the day staring out the window, beyond the projection of the building across the street, and into the view of the open lot beyond. He poured himself glass after glass of water, the original liquid, the liquid that took him back to his time
of freedom and deprivation, and stared out to where the grass stood tall and the branches of the trees caught the wind. When the light shifted toward evening he moved to the cupboard and set the table as he’d been trained to do: three bowls, three mugs, three spoons and the twice-folded cloth napkins. Ducking his head, he went into Madame Guérin’s room and stood over the bed gazing at the heaviness of her face, her skin gone the color of ash, the lines of grief that dropped her chin and tugged at the corners of her eyes. He was hungry. He hadn’t been fed all day. The fire was dead and the house was cold. He motioned to his mouth with his right hand and when Madame Guérin began to stir he took her arm and led her to the kitchen, pointing at the stove.

  As soon as she came through the doorway, he knew that something was wrong. She pulled back, and he could feel her arm trembling against his, and there was the table, set for three. “No,” she said, her voice strained and caught low in the back of her throat, “no,” and it was a word he understood. Her shoulders shifted and she began to cry then, a soft wet insuck of grief and despair, and for a moment he didn’t know what to do. But then, as tentatively and cautiously as he’d stalked the things he trapped in the grass a whole lifetime ago, he moved to the table and took up the bowl, the cup, the spoon and the napkin and silently put them back where they belonged.

  In the years to come, Victor rarely left the house or the small square of the yard, hemmed in as it was by the walls of the surrounding buildings. Madame Guérin became too frail eventually to take him for his walks in the park and so he stood at the window instead for hours at a time or lay in the yard watching the clouds unfurl overhead. He took no pleasure in eating and yet he ate as if he were starved still, still roaming La Bassine with his stomach shrunken in disuse. The food thickened him around the middle and in the haunches. His face took on weight till he was nearly unrecognizable. No one knew. No one cared. He’d once been the sensation of Paris, but now he was forgotten, and even his name—Victor—was forgotten too. Madame Guérin no longer called him by name, no longer spoke at all except to her daughters, who rarely visited, wrapped up as they were in their own lives and passions. And the citizens of Paris, if they remembered him in passing, as they would remember the news of another generation or a tale told round the fire late at night, referred to him only as the Savage.

  One morning Sultan vanished as if he’d never existed and before long there was another cat asleep in the chair or in Madame’s lap as she sat and knitted or stared wearily into the pages of her Bible. Victor barely noticed. The cat was a thing of muscle and hidden organs. It stalked grasshoppers against the wall in the sun and ate from a dish in the kitchen, and with a long, languid thrust of its tongue it would probe itself all over, even to the slit beneath its tail, but mostly it lay inert, sleeping its life away. It was nothing to him. The walls, the ceiling, the glimpse of the distant trees and the sky overhead and all the power of life erupting from the earth at his feet: this was nothing. Not anymore.

  He was forty years old when he died.

  (2005)

  PART IV

  A Death in Kitchawank

  My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain

  I like my wife fine and we had a pretty smooth run of it over the years but there was a sort of—oh, what do I want to say here?—expectedness to the days that sometimes bore down on me till I felt like a piece of furniture that hasn’t been moved in a lifetime. An end table maybe, made of maple, with some fine beveling that serves no other purpose than to collect dust. Which is why—and I’m not making excuses, just stating the facts—I pulled on my black jeans and turtleneck that night, dug my ski mask out of the closet and climbed up the backside of Lily Baron’s cabin to the patch of roof where the deck projects on the second floor and peeped in the window with no other intention but to see what she was doing at eleven forty-five at night, and maybe, if that was what she wanted, to surprise her. Give her a little jolt. In the best possible sense, that is, by way of amiability and with the promise of mutual enjoyment.

  You see, Lily has had it rough this past year. She’s only forty-three, but Frank, her husband who’s no longer with us, was in his sixties, and when he retired, she quit her job as a legal secretary and came up here to Big Timber to live out the rest of her days in tranquility amidst the giant sequoias. They built their dream house on the double lot Frank had bought back in the eighties and became full-timers (or dream cabin, I should say, since the twenty-eight of us who live here year-round as well as the fifty or so part-timers like to think of ourselves as roughing it, and while a couple of us do have actual log cabins built from kits out of actual peeled logs, most of us settle for houses with alpine touches, like cedar paneling, stone fireplaces and mounted animal heads over our hand-hewn mantelpieces. To a man, woman, child and dog, we call them cabins).

  Frank volunteered for neighborhood watch and he helped out in winter with snow removal, and Lily, with her heartbreaking face and a figure unruined by childbearing because she’d borne no children, not to Frank or her previous husband, who, I understand, worked for the Forest Service over at Mineral King before he drank himself senseless and pitched headlong over the rail of the fire lookout, began organizing potlucks and bridge nights down at the lodge, that sort of thing. And she began drinking more than was probably good for her. As did Frank. This—and we’ve all joked about it—is just one of the hazards of living in a fishbowl community at seventy-two hundred feet and a good twisting brake-eating hour from the nearest town in a place of natural beauty so all-encompassing God might have thought to set it aside for His wife. If He even bothered to get married.

  Anyway, Frank liked nature, liked the hills, and despite his age he was always out there hiking no matter the weather. You’d look up from the fire or the TV or your first double vodka and tonic on a snow-bleared winter morning and there he’d be, with his daypack and alpenstock, heading off into the woods without a thought as to trails, compasses or the weather, and if he had a cell phone it really wouldn’t have mattered since the reception here is what they invented the Call Failed indicator for. He went out one spring afternoon with his fly rod and a daypack containing a pint of Jim Beam and two cream cheese and olive sandwiches Lily had sealed in plastic wrap and he never came back. As they later reconstructed it, he was fishing Hellbore Creek for goldens when he must have taken a tumble because his leg was broken in two places, though with his eyes gouged out by the ravens and the way the bear had frolicked with the corpse no one could be sure. He’d been missing four days by the time Search and Rescue found him, the sandwiches gone along with the soft stuff of his eyes and the bourbon drawn down to less than a finger in its intact glass shell. Lily said she was sure he’d suffered and we all tried to reassure her, citing the solace of the bourbon, the soothing rhapsody of the stream and the sun that made way for the stars as if to give him a glimpse of eternity when the nights came on, but privately we knew she was right.

  Of course he’d suffered. Alone with his pain. Hopeless. Fighting off the ravens till he could no longer lift his arms. He’d tried to crawl his way out of the canyon, according to Bill Secord, who was one of the first on the scene, but the pain in his leg was too bad apparently and he didn’t make it more than maybe two hundred yards despite all the scratching in the undergrowth and the way his fingernails were abraded down to the nub.

  As if that wasn’t enough to lay on any woman, especially one as sweet and undeserving of it as Lily, there was the further complication of her accident. And this wasn’t much more than maybe three or four months after the funeral, when she was just starting to climb out of her own personal canyon and was entertaining a man whose name I don’t want to mention here because the sound of that name—hell, the look of him with his fat gloating face hanging out the open window of his pickup—makes me burn up with jealousy like a dry stick of pine laid on the coals. That’s funny too, I mean, that this particular image should pop into my head, because Lily’s accident involved just exactly that: burnin
g. She had one of these old-fashioned popcorn makers, with the hot oil bubbling in the guts of it, and the way I see it she was a bit flustered when this particular individual showed up at the door with a bottle in one hand and a fistful of wilting wildflowers in the other, no way ready even to start thinking along those terms with Frank still intact in the ground, or mostly so, and maybe she was rushing a little, overcompensating in her role as hostess, and when she settled into the couch with her second drink her foot got tangled in the cord and the whole business, scalding oil, Orville Redenbacher’s crackling yellow kernels and the gleaming aluminum cylinder of the popcorn maker itself, came down on her.

  The oil melted the skin across half her back down to the pantyline and wrapped a big annealed scar around her left shoulder and upper arm and burned what looks like two teardrops into the flesh under her left eye, which the plastic surgeon says he can remove and smooth over just like new once she saves up for the next round of operations, because, of course, Frank, who never even bothered to carry a compass with him out into the woods, didn’t have adequate health coverage from his insurer. Or life insurance, for that matter. I remember we all chipped in to defray the funeral expenses, but inevitably we fell well short of the actual cost. Which Lily had to absorb with no help from anybody, not Frank’s sister in Missoula or his one-armed son Lily’d had to put up with through the first ten years of her marriage.