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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Still, this was nothing compared with the second problem. Within six months of Tara’s release, a resident of one of the local villages—a young woman, mother of four—was killed and partially eaten by a tiger that emerged in daylight and stalked down the center of the main street as if it had no fear of people whatever.

  Siobhan

  Her mother was going to keep a tight leash on her—that’s what she’d said, what she’d been saying all week, as the house swelled with relatives, and the Fongs, Dylan’s family, kept coming and going and the presents mounted and the flowers filled every vase in the living room and the family room and spilled out onto the patio too. Siobhan was in the sixth grade and she didn’t need any sort of leash, tight or loose, because she was dutiful and good and did what she was told, or mostly anyway. It was her mother. Her mother was in a state, yelling into her cell phone at the caterers, the florist, even the Unitarian minister she’d picked out to perform the ceremony, and if anybody needed a leash it was her.

  Siobhan tried not to let it bother her. What she focused on, dwelled on, called up as if in some secret fantasy of glamour and excitement no one could begin to enter but her, was the fact that in less than an hour she would be leading the bridesmaids down the aisle at her sister’s wedding, dressed in a mint-green taffeta gown she’d picked out herself. Plus, it was New Year’s Eve, there would be fireworks at the pier and her mother had promised her she could stay up till midnight. Even better—and this had been the subject of a stream of breathless texts to her friends in Mrs. Lindelof’s class for the past month—was where the wedding was being held. It wasn’t going to be in a church or some cheesy reception hall or somebody’s backyard, but in the outdoor pavilion at the San Francisco Zoo, where you’d be able to hear the animals cooing and trumpeting and roaring just as if you were in the jungle. It was the coolest thing she’d ever heard of.

  The limo came, a white one, longer than two cars put together, and she and her mother and father and Aunt Katie had it all to themselves. There was a bar in it, with Coke and 7UP and liquor and little packages of pretzel sticks, M&M’s and macadamia nuts. “Don’t,” her mother warned, snatching at her hand as she reached for the M&M’s. “The last thing I need is to have you with chocolate smears all over your dress.”

  The last thing. Everything was the last thing, everything she did. But her mother was distracted, holding three conversations at once, with Aunt Katie and her father on either side of her and with Megan on the cell because Megan was in the other limo with her bridesmaids, and before they’d gone two blocks Siobhan had managed to stuff three crinkling packages of M&M’s into her purse. Very carefully, watching for her moment, she snuck a handful of the candy-coated pellets into her mouth, the dark rich savor of the chocolate melting away on her tongue because she didn’t dare chew. Her mother’s eyes, framed in eyeliner like an actress’s, were huge, twice the size of normal, and they flared from one thing to another, out the window, to the back of the driver’s head, to Aunt Katie, her father, but not to her, not then, not while the chocolate lay secretly on her tongue and the excitement built in her like a beating drum.

  “You damn well better,” her mother said into the phone and then ended the call. “I don’t know, Tom,” her mother said, her voice jerking at the words as if each one was attached to a string that went all the way down her throat. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Aunt Katie—young, blond, pretty, with a face just like Siobhan’s mother’s, only without all the lines—said, “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. Relax, Janie, just relax.”

  Her father let out a curse. “Christ,” he said. “What is it now?”

  “I just can’t get used to it.”

  “What? Oh, shit, don’t tell me—”

  “Dylan’s father, with those teeth. And the mother—she’s the nicest person, it’s not that, but she’s so pushy and now we have to sit around and eat, I don’t know, sea cucumber and squid at our own daughter’s reception—”

  “Just say it—they’re Chinese, right? Well, I’ve got news for you—they’ve been Chinese since the kids started dating. Can’t you give it a rest? Or are you just going to go ahead and spoil it for everybody?”

  “I know, I know: you’re right. But she’s so dark. And short. Even in heels. I mean, really, have you looked at her?”

  “What are you talking about? Who?”

  But her mother, her eyes bugging like those cue-ball eyes the boys always brought to class on the last day of school, just jerked her head to stare out the window, both her feet in their ivory patent-leather heels tapping so furiously it sounded as if the limo was falling apart.

  Vijay

  A week earlier, on Christmas Day, he’d awakened feeling rinsed out and headachy, just maybe half a beat away from getting up and being sick in the toilet. He’d made the rounds of the parties the night before with his older brother Vikram, who was twenty-one and already had his associate’s degree in pharmacology, and his best friend, Manny, who was his classmate at Lincoln High. There’d been pot and plenty of booze, tequila and vodka mostly. And beer, of course—beer was like water to him now. He could drink with the best of them—had been drinking since his sophomore year—and he didn’t get silly or weepy like some of the retards in his class and he didn’t let it affect his grades either. He’d applied to Berkeley, Davis and San Diego State as his first-choice schools and six backup schools too, and he intended to get into at least one of the top three and win a scholarship while he was at it. But right now everything was a little hazy and the smell of his mother’s cooking seeping in under the door didn’t make things any better.

  Curry. The eternal curry. But then why should she cook anything special today, which meant nothing to them, after all. If Jesus had gone and gotten born on some day approximating this one two thousand years ago and then went on to get nailed to a cross, sacrificed like a lamb or some Hazuri goat, what did it matter? His parents were Sikhs, both of them born in Punjab, and he and Vikram were American, pure and simple, and all the hocus-pocus of priests and incense and kneeling and chanting that Manny’s family bought into as if it were the biggest thing in the world was beyond irrelevant. He knew firsthand. Because he’d gone to the big drafty church on Ashton Avenue for Manny’s confirmation when he was fourteen, and while the whole thing was interesting in a kind of anthropological way—Manny in a suit, Manny mumbling back at the priest, Spanish and Latin and English all leaching into one another, people dipping their fingers in a trough of water that was no different from what came out of the tap except that it had been blessed by the priest—it was the party afterward that had lit him up. There was a piñata. Tamales. And Manny’s father—because this was an initiation and they were grown up now—allowed them each a glass of thin red wine that tasted like the wax of the white candles blazing over the shrine in the living room.

  The sheets felt stiff. And there was a smell, a vague nameless funk that seemed to rise around him every time he shifted position. Were they stained? Had he come home and masturbated last night? He couldn’t remember. He lay there a moment longer, then pushed himself up and went into the bathroom across the hall and drank down two glasses of water. Vikram’s door was closed. What time was it? It felt late, past breakfast anyway. He padded back into his bedroom and pulled his cell from the front pocket of his jeans and checked the time: 12:30. Then he thought of his mother downstairs cooking and his father, on this universal day off, sitting there in front of the TV, watching soccer on the Spanish-language channel, though he didn’t understand a word of the language—What do I care, Vijay? I see the ball, I see the referee, I see the ball go into the net—and then, on an impulse, he hit Manny’s number.

  “Hey,” he said, when Manny answered.

  “Hey.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “I don’t know. Hungover. How about you?”

  He shrugged, no big deal, though Manny wasn’t there t
o see it. “Maybe a little. But I just got to get out of here today, what with my dad watching soccer and moms doing whatever, cooking, the crossword puzzles, I don’t know. I was thinking—you cool with it, you done with the family stuff?”

  “I don’t know, sure. What do you got in mind?”

  “There’s nobody going to be at the zoo today, it’ll be like deserted, so I thought, once I tear Vik away from his sexy dreams, maybe we just go over there and hang out, you know?”

  No response. But he could hear Manny breathing on the other side.

  “We can like grab a burger on the way. And Vik still has that Stoli from last night—so even if the stores are closed . . . And weed—weed, of course. What do you say?”

  Tatiana

  She was a Siberian, four and a half years old, with the wide head, heavy frame and pale fur that distinguished her subspecies of Panthera tigris. Like Tara, she’d been born in captivity—at the Denver Zoo—and then transferred to San Francisco for breeding purposes two years earlier. That first day, when she came out of sedation, she found herself in the cage she’d been forced into just before dawn in the thin dry air of the Rocky Mountains, the only air she’d ever known, but there was something different about the cage now and it took her a moment to apprehend it: the front panel stood open. The smell must have come to her then, dank and lingering, the reek of the sea that was less than a quarter mile away, and then all the other smells she would have recognized from that morning and the morning before and all the mornings of her life, animal smells, the scent of urine and feces and the riveting anal discharge big cats use to mark their territory.

  She didn’t emerge right away, not that first day. She seemed to prefer the cage, with its impermeable top and the fading odors of her home, safe there from whatever loomed over her, above the high concrete walls of the outdoor enclosure in which the cage had been placed. Sounds came to her: the harsh broken cries of parrots and macaws, the noise of traffic out on the street and the engines of planes that were like insects droning across the sky, the trumpeting of an elephant, a snarl, a roar, and over it all the screeching of monkeys, monkeys and apes.

  Vijay

  He hadn’t confessed it to anyone, not even his brother, because he wasn’t a dork and didn’t want to be taken for one, like all the other Indians and Chinese he’d been lumped together with in school since kindergarten, but his secret love, his true love, wasn’t for the engineering degree his parents kept pushing him toward, but for animals. He wanted to be a zoologist—or better yet, a field biologist, studying animals in a state of nature, just like on the TV shows. Both Vik and Manny would say things like, Why the zoo all the time, man, what’s the deal? You in love with a gorilla, or what? And he would shrug and say, I don’t know, you got a better suggestion? And they didn’t. Because the zoo was five blocks from the house and he and Vik had been going there since they were kids, just to get out from under the critical eye of their mother, who would have objected if they were going to just hang out on the street like hooligans (Hooligans and I don’t know, gangbangers, isn’t that what they call them?) but found the idea of the zoo vaguely educational. It was a place where they weren’t going to get in trouble anyway—or that was the way she saw it.

  By the time they got to the burger place on Sloat across from the zoo, it was already three in the afternoon and it just seemed natural to doctor their Cokes with a hit or two from the bottle, especially since it was a holiday and it was a hair-of-the-dog kind of thing, though Manny said it was disgusting to waste good vodka like that so he ordered an orange drink to go with his. It was a gray day, heavy with mist rolling in off the ocean. The burger place was deserted, the streets were empty. Christmas. They stared out the window on nothing, chewing.

  “What time you got to be home?” he asked Manny. “It’s like a special dinner today, right? With like your aunts and uncles and all that?”

  Manny ducked his head, took a pull of his orange and vodka. He was in his board shorts and a black hoodie and he was wearing a brand-new Warriors cap, a Christmas present from his sister. “I don’t know,” he said. “Six, six-thirty. And yeah, I got to be there.”

  Vik hadn’t said much to this point, his eyes raw and red, his cheeks puffed out as if the burger was repeating on him. “Hey, if we’re going to go,” he said now, “we ought to go because we can’t smoke here and I think I’ve had about enough of sitting and staring out the window on nothing—anybody comes by and sees us here they’re going to think we’re losers, right? Primo losers.”

  So they got up and shuffled out the door, Vijay secretly pleased it was his brother who’d got them motivated instead of him because he wouldn’t want to seem too eager, but the fact was the zoo would be closing at dusk and they didn’t really have all that much time. Out on the sidewalk, Vik lit a joint and they passed it hand to hand as they crossed the street to the zoo’s entrance. “So Christmas,” Vik was saying to Manny. “Do you have a tree and all that?”

  Manny had his head down as if he had to watch his feet to be sure where they were going. He seemed rocked already. “Yeah,” he murmured.

  “That cool?”

  “Yeah. We put lights on it, ornaments, colored balls.”

  “Spangles? Those silver things, I mean?”

  “Tinsel, yeah.”

  They were almost at the ticket kiosk now, Vijay digging into his wallet for the family pass their mother renewed each year. All he had to do was flash it at whoever was behind the window, usually a bony red-haired girl with no tits and an onyx stud like a mole under her lip, and she just waved them in—Manny, with his dark skin and black buzz cut, passing for just another brother in the Singh family.

  Vik said, “That’s a German thing, you know.”

  “What, tinsel?”

  “The tree. ‘O Tannenbaum.’ Didn’t you guys have to sing that in elementary school?” Then he was laughing, one of those warm-up laughs that promised more but really wasn’t out of control yet. “I mean, it’s not Mexican or even American, but German. Can you picture it, all those Nazis handing out these scrawny little trees to cheer up the Jews at what, Auschwitz?”

  They were there now, at the window, and Vijay was flashing the family membership card, and though the girl wasn’t there—Christmas—but some fat old man instead, it wasn’t a problem. He barely glanced up from his iPhone, the old man—fat, fat as a Butterball turkey stuffed with sausage and chestnuts and cranberries and whatever—fixing them for half a second with his beady brown dog’s eyes, and then he waved them in.

  Siobhan

  Of course, the wedding didn’t start right away (and the groom couldn’t see the bride because that was bad luck), so she had to go into this little back room that looked like somebody’s office with her sister and her friends, everybody putting on makeup and texting like mad and passing around a silver flask with Sambuca in it. Nobody offered her any, which she wouldn’t have taken anyway, even out of curiosity, because liquor was for adults and she wasn’t an adult and was in no particular hurry to be one. She did have a Red Bull though, and it made her feel as if she were in the final lap of a race at school and beating everybody by a mile.

  Then her mother came for them and they were outside in the damp air, the fog misting around them and the smell of the animals sharp in her nostrils. There was a hooting in the distance, one of the monkeys, the ones with voices like fire alarms. It just kept going, this monkey, and when you thought it was going to stop, when it slowed down and the hoots were softer and spaced further apart, it was only gathering breath for the next blast. That was the thing about having the wedding at the zoo—it was weird, but in a good way, because you never knew what was going to happen. Unlike in a church. Here was this thing out of a jungle someplace that didn’t care in the slightest about weddings and caterers and the volume of the string quartet her mother had hired to play the wedding march as they came down the walk and under the roof of the open-air pavi
lion.

  She was watching her feet, afraid to trip or stumble or do something wrong, all the adults standing now and looking back over their shoulders to get a glimpse of the bride, while the string quartet strained to drown out the monkey. All the men were in tuxedos. Some of the women wore hats. There were flowers everywhere. And then, just as she got to where the minister was waiting along with Dylan and the best man, she saw Dylan’s little brother Jason, who was thirteen and a secret smoker of clove cigarettes, Jason, dressed in a suit and tie and giving her his starving zombie look to make her laugh. But she didn’t laugh, though the Red Bull was pulsing through her. She just swept up the aisle the way she’d practiced it at the rehearsal, smiling at everybody as if she were the one getting married—and maybe someday she would be.

  Afterward, when people were standing in line for food and drinks and the DJ was setting up his equipment, Jason came up to her with a plate of pot stickers and offered her one. “Did you hear that monkey?” he said. “I thought he was going to bust a gut.”

  She hadn’t noticed till that moment that the sound was gone, long gone, replaced now by the prandial buzz of the adults poised over their plates and wine glasses. “It was so funny,” she said, using her fingers to pluck a pot sticker from the edge of the plate.

  “If any monkey knows any reason why these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

  She laughed at the very moment she bit into the pot sticker, which caused a dribble of grease to run down the front of her dress. She glanced up guiltily to see if her mother was watching, but her mother was on the far side of the pavilion with Aunt Katie, waving a glass of yellowish wine as if it were a baton.