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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Even worse, for the first time in my life I had to contend with the fact that I wasn’t the biggest man around. At six feet ten inches and four hundred and twenty-odd pounds I wasn’t far off, but there were two men heavier, in addition to the pituitary case (freak or not, he’d still looked down at me). All my life I’d been the one looking down on the world, the biggest boy and then the biggest man not only in my own bustling port city but in the entire province. I was strong too. At the Fiesta de Primavera I once lifted two sheep above my head, one in each hand, and for a prank when I was in my teens I hauled the Mayor’s shining black Duesenberg coupe up the steps of the Ministry of Justice and left it there at the feet of the gilded statue of the President. By the time I turned twenty I was earning a good wage cranking the capstan that lifted the wooden drawbridge in the center of town so that the high-masted fishing vessels could pass beneath it—and if that seems unremarkable, just consider that formerly three mules had been required to do the job, mules that were now free to pull plows through the fields of maize that ring the city, while the muleskinner himself was able to retire on a small pension and move into the house his mother had left him at the place where the river runs brown into the moss-green sea. People would come out to watch me work—families with picnic baskets, nubile women, strongmen, grandmothers, sailors. My legend grew. Of course, to be a legend, to attain that status, is to court attention. That was how they found me. And truly? I wish they never had.

  —

  Within the month the first rumors of discontent began to circulate among us. If in the beginning it had seemed as if we’d arrived in paradise, our days given over to leisure and nothing expected of us but the essentials, the routine began to wear on us. We were free to roam the compound by day and we had books and a communal radio and we played games of cards and dice, the usual sort of thing, but we were locked in at night, and the cages—though they were roomy enough and each equipped with a toilet, desk, couch and reading lamp in addition to a gargantuan steel-frame bed—were an oppression of the spirit. The man I was to become closest to—Fruto Lacayo, a former circus fat man who stood seven inches shorter but outweighed me by some forty pounds—was the first to voice his complaints.

  We were in the courtyard one afternoon, smoking, chatting, getting our bearings in this place that was not, despite appearances, a former zoo, but in fact a camp where the regime had kept dissidents in a time before dissidence had been so radically discouraged as to eliminate it altogether. Fruto had been pacing along the path that traced the outer walls under the beneficent gaze of the guard in the tower (who wasn’t a guard at all, we were told, but rather a facilitator) when he came directly across the courtyard to where I was sitting in the shade with the latest issue of Hombre, examining the photographs of the slim-ankled women who stared out from its pages with looks of air-brushed longing. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, gasping for breath, “I feel like my joint’s about to fall off.”

  I gave him a wary smile. He was a fat man. I was a giant. And if you don’t see the distinction, then you have no access to my soul and no appreciation either. I shrugged. “Better than working, isn’t it?”

  There was a sheen of sweat on his jowls. It was winter then, thank the Lord and the Blessed Virgin, but still the humidity was high and the afternoon temperatures were in the eighties and even nineties so that we were always uncomfortable, especially where our parts chafed. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “It’s these cages. We’re not animals.”

  “No,” I said, “we’re not.”

  “Do you know what the President did before he joined the army—professionally, I mean?”

  I didn’t. He’d been president before I was born and I expected he’d be president still when I moved on to the next world.

  Fruto winked, as if he were letting me in on a great secret. “You don’t? You really don’t?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, let me tell you, let me awaken you: he was a cattle breeder.”

  —

  The initial breakout wasn’t a serious attempt—it was perfunctory, at best—but at least it made a statement, at least it was a beginning. Early one night, after we’d lain with the evening’s women and were gathered around the radio in the courtyard half-listening to the tail end of one of the President’s speeches (rumba music, that was what we wanted, and “Rumba Ciudad” was due to come on at eight), Fruto heaved himself up from his chair, and addressing us all, growled, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it. I’m going home. Tonight. Soon as it’s dark.”

  There was a flutter of astonished voices: You can’t be serious! Have you gone mad? Leave here? Melchior Arce, a former stevedore who was nearly as wide across the shoulders as me though his head was disproportionately small and his left hand had been mangled in an accident so that it looked like a crushed tarantula dangling from his shirtsleeve, gave a whistle of surprise. “The only way they’ll get me out of here,” he said, “is in a coffin.” He paused to bite off the end of his cigar and spit it in the dirt. “What’s wrong with you, fat man—you a maricón?”

  “You want to know the truth?” Fruto went on, ignoring the insult. “I don’t like big women. Never have. I like them petite, the way women should be—if I want to see fat I can just look in the mirror.”

  If I’d been feeling the stirrings of my own discontent, now I went rigid with longing: all I could see was the face of Rosa, my Rosita, the girl I’d left behind when I’d signed the agreement and come all the way across the country to be cooped up here in this stifling compound with its jungle reek and chicken-wire cages that showed us for what we really were. Rosita was petite by any measure, a hundred pounds, if that, and an inch short of five feet. I too had always been attracted to the sleek and unencumbered, to the girls who looked more like children than women, and why was that? Because opposites attract, of course they do—otherwise we’d all be pygmies or giants instead of something proportional, something in between. I’d asked her to wait for me. I’ll be gone six months, I told her, a year at most. And we’ll save the stipend—every penny of it—so we can be married when I come back. She asked what the government wanted of me—pressed me, over and over—but I couldn’t tell her. Secret work, I’d said. And she’d looked up at me out of her saucer eyes, beseeching, wanting more, the truth. Top secret, I said. For the military.

  But now, as soon as Fruto spoke the words, I knew I was going with him. We gathered a few things—sliced meat, bread, chocolate bars left over from dinner—and waited till lights out at ten, when the nocturnal clamor of the jungle rose to a crescendo and our fellow gigantes, exhausted from their venereal labors, turned over in their massive beds and began to snore. Then we made our way across the courtyard to the main gate, which was secured by a padlocked chain doubled over on itself. The guard was asleep. Nothing moved but for a solitary rat silhouetted against the faint glow of the village that lay three miles to the west of us. I took hold of the chain in the grip of my two hands and snapped it without even trying (it was nothing, a child’s toy, a poor weak thing designed to forestall ordinary men), and then I rolled back the gate on its lubricated rail and in the next moment we were outside in the darkness.

  The problem was Fruto. We hadn’t gone five hundred yards down the dirt lane that would take us to the village where there were taxis, buses, even a rail line that would give us access to the whole of the country, to freedom, to the slim and beautiful, to Rosita, when he sat ponderously on a wet stump overgrown with black twisted vines and, wheezing heavily, croaked, “I can’t go on.”

  “Can’t go on? What are you talking about? We just left the place!” I crushed mosquitoes against the back of my neck. Something flapped across the darkened road.

  “Give me a minute. Let me catch my breath.” I could barely make out the shape of him there in the dense clot of shadows. I heard him slapping at his own host of mosquitoes. “You don’t have one of those sandwiches handy, do you?�
�� he asked.

  “Look,” I said, “if we expect to get out of this, to go home—you do want to go home, don’t you?—we’ll need to get to the village and purchase a bus ticket or hire a taxi and be gone before they bring in the morning’s women.”

  “Go on without me,” he said. The air seemed to tear through his lungs. “I’ll follow you after I’ve had a bit of rest. And a sandwich. Let’s split up the provisions now. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case we don’t meet up again.”

  So I left him there. It was no less than he deserved. The worst that would happen was that they would take him back to his cage, to food and leisure and the manipulation of the flesh. For my part I made it as far as the village, where I found myself distracted by the lights of a cantina. I had to duck to get through the door. Everyone stared. I should say in my own defense that I’m not one of these men who drink themselves senseless, but they didn’t allow us liquor in the compound—for fear it would affect our performance, I suppose—and the taste of it after more than a month without made me want another taste and another after that. I slept somewhere, I don’t remember where. And in the morning, when they came for me, I went along with them as docilely as one of the sheep I’d lifted above my head as if they were no more than woolly clouds trailing across a serene blue sky.

  —

  The following afternoon, after we’d eaten our lunch and ministered to the women who joined us each day at siesta time, Fruto and I were summoned to the military barracks on the far side of the village. A truck painted in camouflage colors took us through town (ordinary men, ordinary women, bicyclists, street vendors, dogs that were so ordinary even the bitches that whelped them wouldn’t have given them a second glance) and into another compound, this one made of whitewashed brick, with a three-story building at the center of it. Corporal Carrera led us up the stairs and into a big office on the second floor that was presided over by a monumental oil portrait of the President and a dozen limp flags representing each of the country’s provinces. There was a bank of windows, spilling light. Beneath them stood a mahogany desk, very grand in size, though to us it was like the sort of thing children make use of in elementary school, and seated at the desk, in full military uniform replete with epaulettes and layered decorations, was a man we recognized as Colonel Lázaro Apunto, Director of Educational and Agricultural Resources for the Western Region. There were no seats for us, or no seats large enough, and so we were made to stand.

  A long moment elapsed, Corporal Carrera stationed at the door, the Colonel gazing up at us with a look caught halfway between irascibility and awe. Finally, he spoke. “So, I’m given to understand that you two have been abrogating your patriotic duties, is that correct?”

  I said, “Yes, that is correct.”

  “You have complaints—legitimate complaints?”

  This started Fruto going in the way that a molded steel crank, in the hands of the President’s chauffeur, might fire up a balky engine. “We are not animals,” he said, “and we want our privacy. We can’t be expected to be, be intimate, in a chicken-wire cage where anyone can see for himself how we go about our business, and the heat is intolerable. And the insects. And—”

  “And the food?” the Colonel asked, cutting him off. “Is that not of the highest order, rich in protein, flavorful? And your stipends, the money we send on each week to your families—your loved ones, whose home addresses we scrupulously maintain—aren’t they sufficient? And what of work? It’s not as if we’re asking you to work.”

  “The food is excellent,” I said, stifling the impulse to append Your Excellency to the assessment.

  “Good,” the Colonel sighed, leaning back in his chair, “very good.” He was a little man, with mustaches. But then they were all little men, everyone in the military, everyone on the street, even the President himself. “For a moment there I’d thought you were going to renege on your contract with the government, but here I see the whole matter is nothing really, just a question of adjustments. You want stucco walls built over the chicken wire? Fine. It will not be a problem. In fact”—he scrawled something on a pad—“we’ll see to it immediately.”

  “Tile floors,” Fruto put in. “For the sake of the coolness on our feet. A fan. Two fans. And a radio in each—room—and, and a day off. Once a week. Sundays. Sundays off.” He bowed his head, mopped sweat. His grin was like a grimace. “The day of rest, eh? Our Lord’s day.”

  The Colonel tented his fingers, smiled benignly at us. He waved a hand. “All this can be arranged. Your needs are our needs. If you haven’t already divined the importance of the project in which you’re participating, let me enlighten you. The President—the country—has many enemies, I don’t have to tell you that. They are building up their armed forces, constantly building and accelerating, and who can guess what their purposes are—but we must counter them. Do you know your Greeks?”

  “Greeks?” I echoed, mystified.

  “Homer. Aeschylus. Euripides. They had their heroes, their champions, their Achilleses and Ajaxes, and that is what the President envisions for our country’s forces—and not simply individual heroes but an entire regiment of them, do you see?”

  “Like Samson?” Fruto put in.

  The Colonel shot him a look. “Not the Hebrews, the Greeks. They knew how to win a war.”

  “The President must be a very patient man,” I offered. “It’ll take generations.”

  A shrug. “‘Prescient’ is the word. That is why he is the father of our country. And don’t concern yourself: we will breed the issue of your labors—the females, that is—once they reach puberty. And when that issue reaches puberty, we will breed them as well.” He fumbled for something on his desk, sifting through the papers there until he held up a single sheet, transparent in the light glazing the windows. “Do you see this? This is a sample requisition form to be sent out to the boot makers of the future, calling for boots in exactly your size, señor, eighteen, triple E. Just think of it.” He settled back in his chair. “Helmets the size of birdbaths, jerseys like tents. No, my friends, the President is a man of foresight, a futurist you might say, and his vision is all-encompassing. Are you not proud of your country? Do you not want, with all your heart, to protect and nourish her?”

  Fruto stood there dazed. I nodded in assent, but it was only for show. Was I seething inside? Not just then, perhaps—we’d already had a pretty fair idea of what was wanted from us and we had, after all, signed on the dotted line, as venal as any other men—but I could see the months to come, years even, stretching out before me like a sentence in the penitentiary.

  Corporal Carrera pulled open the door behind us, our signal to vacate the room: our business here was concluded. But just as we reached the door, my legs working autonomously and Fruto heaving for breath and wiping at his massive face with the great sopping field of his handkerchief, the Colonel called out to us. “Now go and do your duty, for the love of your country and of the President. Go to your female volunteers—whose stipends are but half of yours, incidentally, and so it should be—and, in your throes, think of him.”

  —

  The Colonel was as good as his word. Improvements came rapidly, laborers from the village appearing the very next day to reinforce the frames of the cages with four-by-four posts, enclose them in walls of lath and stucco and lay tile in a handsome herringbone pattern you could stare at for hours. There were tin roofs. Each of us got a radio. At night, electric fans stirred the breezes and mosquito netting held the insects at bay. I’d volunteered to help with the work—let’s face it, I was bored to the point of vacuity with all that sitting around—but the Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. “No,” he said, on one of his inspections of the compound. “You must conserve your energy”—and here the hint of a smile appeared beneath the dark cantilever of his mustaches—“for your President and your country.”

  In the i
nterim, we were bused to the women’s compound, which, as it turned out, lay some three miles to the north of the men’s facility, on the banks of a nameless oozing watercourse that bred mosquitoes and stinging flies in the pestilent millions so that we were all of us, men and women alike, scratching furiously the entire time we were there. What distinguished their compound from ours, aside from the increase of insects? Not much. They too lived in cages, but they were crammed in, four or five of them to a cage, and their camp stretched as far as the eye could see. If we were nine, the women numbered in the hundreds, and this of course reflected a simple calculus any cattle breeder could have worked out on a single sheet of paper.

  The women I was put in with the first night were among the biggest in the camp, selected especially for me. And by big I don’t necessarily mean the heaviest—such women were reserved for Fruto and his ilk—but the tallest and broadest, with the longest limbs and thickest bones. These women could have felled forests, collapsed mines, held back the sea just by linking arms. Where the President had found them, I couldn’t imagine—not till one of them called me by name.