Wild Child and Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Before I could say “Let’s have a look” in my paternal and reassuring tones, the boy held out his hands, palms up, and I saw the wounds there. The burns were third degree, right in the center of each palm, and involved several fingers as well. Leathery scabs—eschars—had replaced the destroyed tissue and were seeping a deep wine-colored fluid around the margins. I’d seen such burns before, of course, on innumerable occasions, the result of a house fire, smoking in bed, a child blundering against a stove, but these seemed odd, as if they’d been deliberately inflicted. I glanced up sharply at the mother and asked what had happened.

  “I was busy with a customer,” she said, dropping her eyes as if to summon the image, “a big order, a family of seven, and I wasn’t watching him—and Francisco wasn’t there; he’s out selling bicycle tires now, you know, just so we can make ends meet. Dámaso must have reached into the brazier when my back was turned. He took out two hot coals, Doctor, one in each hand. I only discovered what he’d done when I smelled the flesh burning.” She gave me a glance from beneath the continuous eyebrow that made her look as if she were perpetually scowling. “It smelled just like goat. Only different.”

  “But how—?” I exclaimed, unable to finish the question. I didn’t credit her for a minute. No one, not even the fakirs of India (and they are fakers), could hold on to a burning coal long enough to suffer third-degree burns.

  “He’s not normal, Doctor. He doesn’t feel pain the way others do. “Look here”—and she lifted the child’s right leg as if it weren’t even attached to him, rolling up his miniature trousers to show me a dark raised scar the size of an adult’s spread hand—“do you see this? This is where that filthy pit bull Isabel Briceño keeps came through the fence and bit him, and we’ve gone to the lawyer over it too, believe me, but he never cried out or said a word. The dog had him down in the dirt, chewing on him like he was a bone, and if my husband hadn’t gone out into the yard to throw his shaving water on the rosebushes I think he would have been torn to pieces.”

  She looked out the window a moment, as if to collect herself. The boy stared at me out of his unblinking eyes. Very slowly, as if he were in some perverse way proud of what had befallen him or of how stoically he’d endured, he began to smile, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d make a first-rate soldier in whatever war we were prosecuting when he grew up.

  “And do you see this?” she went on, tracing her index finger over the boy’s lips. “These scars here?” I saw a tracery of pale jagged lines radiating out from his mouth. “This is where he’s bitten himself—bitten himself without knowing it.”

  “Señora Funes,” I said in my most caustic tone, the tone I reserve for inebriates with swollen livers and smokers who cough up blood while lighting yet another cigarette, and right there in my office, no less, “I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth here. This boy has been abused. I’ve never seen a more egregious case. You should be ashamed of yourself. Worse: you should be reported to the authorities.”

  She rolled her eyes. The boy sat like a mannequin in her lap, as if he were made of wood. “You don’t understand: he doesn’t feel pain. Nothing. Go ahead. Prick him with your needle—you can push it right through his arm and he wouldn’t know the difference.”

  Angry now—what sort of dupe did she take me for?—I went straight to the cabinet, removed a disposable syringe, prepared an injection (a half-dose of the B12 I keep on hand for the elderly and anemic) and dabbed a spot on his stick of an arm with alcohol. They both watched indifferently as the needle slid in. The boy never flinched. Never gave any indication that anything was happening at all. But that proved nothing. One child out of a hundred would steel himself when I presented the needle (though the other ninety-nine would shriek as if their fingernails were being pulled out, one by one).

  “Do you see?” she said.

  “I see nothing,” I replied. “He didn’t flinch, that’s all. Many children—some, anyway—are real little soldiers about their injections.” I hovered over him, looking into his face. “You’re a real little solider, aren’t you, Dámaso?” I said.

  From the mother, in a weary voice: “We call him Sin Dolor, Doctor. That’s his nickname. That’s what his father calls him when he misbehaves, because no amount of spanking or pinching or twisting his arm will even begin to touch him. Sin Dolor, Doctor. The Painless One.”

  The next time I saw him he must have been seven or eight, I don’t really recall exactly, but he’d grown into a reedy, solemn boy with great, devouring eyes and his father’s Indian hair, still as thin as a puppet and still looking anemic. This time the father brought him in, carrying the boy in his arms. My first thought was worms, and I made a mental note to dose him before he left, but then it occurred to me that it must only have been his mother’s cooking and I dismissed the idea. A stool sample would do. But of course we’d need to draw blood to assess hemoglobin levels—if the parents were willing, that is. Both of them were notoriously tightfisted and I rarely saw any of the Funes clan in my offices unless something were seriously amiss.

  “What seems to be the problem?” I asked, rising to take Francisco Funes’ hand in my own.

  With a grunt, he bent down to set the boy on his feet. “Go ahead, Dámaso,” he said, “walk for the doctor.”

  I noticed that the boy stood unevenly, favoring his right leg. He glanced first at his father, then at me, dipped his shoulder in resignation and walked to the door and back, limping as if he’d dislocated his knee. He looked up with a smile. “I think something’s wrong with my leg,” he said in a voice as reduced and apologetic as a confessor’s.

  I cupped him beneath his arms and swung him up onto the examining table, giving the father a look—if this wasn’t child abuse, then what was?—and asked, “Did you have an accident?”

  His father answered for him. “He’s broken his leg, can’t you see that? Jumping from the roof of the shed when he should know better—” Francisco Funes was a big man, powerfully built, with a low but penetrating voice, and he leveled a look of wrath on his son, as if to say that the truth of the matter was evident and the boy would have a whipping when he got home, broken leg or no.

  I ignored him. “Can you stretch out here for me on your back?” I said to the boy, patting the examining table. The boy complied, lifting both his legs to the table without apparent effort, and the first thing I noticed were the scars there, a constellation of burns and slashes uncountable running from his ankles to his thighs, and I felt the outrage come up in me all over again. Abuse! The indictment flared in my head. I was about to call for Elvira to come in and evict the father from my offices so that I could treat the son—and quiz him too—when I ran my hand over the boy’s left shin and discovered the swelling there. He did indeed have a broken leg—a fractured tibia, from the feel of it. “Does this hurt?” I asked, putting pressure on the spot.

  The boy shook his head.

  “Nothing hurts him,” the father put in. He was hovering over me, looking impatient, expecting to be cheated and wanting only to extract the pesos from his wallet as if his son’s injury were a sort of tax and then get on with the rest of his life.

  “We’ll need X-rays,” I said.

  “No X-rays,” he growled. “I knew I should have taken him to the curandero, I knew it. Just set the damn bone and get it over with.”

  I felt the boy’s gaze on me. He was absolutely calm, his eyes like the motionless pools of the rill that brought the water down out of the mountains and into the cistern behind our new cottage at the seashore. For the first time it occurred to me that something extraordinary was going on here, a kind of medical miracle: the boy had fractured his tibia and should have been writhing on the table and crying out with the pain of it, but he looked as if there were nothing at all the matter, as if he’d come into the friendly avuncular doctor’s office just to have a look around at the skeleton on its stand and the framed diplomas on the whitewashed walls and to bask in the metallic glow of the equipment Elvira
polished every morning before the patients started lining up outside the door.

  It hit me like a thunderclap: he’d walked on a broken leg. Walked on it and didn’t know the difference but for the fact that he was somehow mysteriously limping. I couldn’t help myself. I gripped his leg to feel the alignment of the bone at the site of the fracture. “Does this hurt?” I asked. I felt the bone slip into place. The light outside the window faded and then came up again as an unseen cloud passed overhead. “This?” I asked. “This?”

  After that day, after I’d set and splinted the bone, put the boy in a cast and lent him a couple of old mismatched crutches before going out to the anteroom and telling Francisco Funes to forget the bill—“Free of charge,” I said—I felt my life expand. I realized that I was staring a miracle in the face, and who could blame me for wanting to change the course of my life, to make my mark as one of the giants of the profession to be studied and revered down through the ages instead of fading away into the terminal ennui of a small-town practice, of the doves on the wire, the caldereta in the pot and the cottage at the seaside? The fact was that Dámaso Funes must have harbored a mutation in his genes, a positive mutation, superior, progressive, nothing at all like the ones that had given us the faceless infant and all the other horrors that paraded through the door of the clinic day in and day out. If that mutation could be isolated—if the genetic sequence could be discovered—then the boon for our poor suffering species would be immeasurable. Imagine a pain-free old age. Painless childbirth, surgery, dentistry. Imagine Elvira’s patients in the oncology ward, racing round in their wheelchairs, grinning and joking to the last. What freedom! What joy! What an insuperable coup over the afflictions that twist and maim us and haunt us to the grave!

  I began to frequent the Funes stall in the hour before siesta, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy, to befriend him, take him into my confidence, perhaps even have him move into the house and take the place of the child Elvira and I had never had because of the grinding sadness of the world. I tried to be casual. “Buenas tardes,” I would say in my heartiest voice as Mercedes Funes raised her careworn face from the grill. “How are you? And how are those mouthwatering tacos? Yes, yes, I’ll take two. Make it three.” I even counterfeited eating them, though it was only a nibble and only of the tortilla itself, while whole legions of my patients past and present lined up for their foil-wrapped offerings. Two months must have gone by in this way before I caught sight of Dámaso. I ordered, stepped aside, and there he was, standing isolated behind the grill, even as his younger siblings—there were three new additions to the clan—scrabbled over their toys in the dirt.

  His eyes brightened when he saw me and I suppose I said something obvious like “I see that leg has healed up well. Still no pain, eh?”

  He was polite, well-bred. He came out from behind the stall and took my hand in a formal way. “I’m fine,” he said, and paused. “But for this.” He lifted his dirty T-shirt (imprinted with the logo of some North American pop band, three sneering faces and a corona of ragged hair) and showed me an open wound the size of a fried egg. Another burn.

  “Ooh,” I exclaimed, wincing. “Would you like to come back to the office and I’ll treat that for you?” He just looked at me. The moment hovered. The smoke rose from the grill. “Gratis?”

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other—he must have felt himself immortal, as all children do until they become sufficiently acquainted with death and all the miseries that precede and attend it, but of course he was subject to infection, loss of digits, limbs, the sloughing of the flesh and corruption of the internal organs, just like anyone else. Though he couldn’t feel any of it. Mercifully. He shrugged again. Looked to his mother, who was shifting chunks of goat around the cheap screen over the brazier as the customers called out their orders. “I need to help my mother,” he said. I was losing him.

  It was then that I hit on a stratagem, the sort of thing that comes on a synaptical flutter like the beating of internal wings: “Do you want to see my scorpions?”

  I watched his face change, the image of a foreshortened arachnid with its claws and pendent stinger rising miasmic before him. He gave a quick glance to where his mother was making change for Señora Padilla, an enormous woman of well over three hundred pounds whom I’ve treated for hypertension, adult-onset diabetes and a virulent genital rash no standard medication seemed able to eradicate, and then he ducked behind the brazier, only to emerge a moment later just up the street from where I was standing. He signaled impatiently with his right hand and I gave up the ruse of lunching on his mother’s wares, turned my back on the stall and fell into step with him.

  “I keep one in a jar,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking of scorpions. “A brown one.”

  “Probably Vaejovis spinigeris, very common in these parts. Does it show dark stripes on its tail?”

  He nodded in a vague way, which led me to believe he hadn’t looked all that closely. It was a scorpion—that was enough for him. “How many do you have?” he asked, striding along without the slightest suggestion of a limp.

  I should say, incidentally, that I’m an amateur entomologist—or, more specifically, arachnologist—and that scorpions are my specialty. I collect them in the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies, though my specimens are very much alive. In those days, I kept them in terraria in the back room of the clinic, where they clung contentedly to the undersides of the rocks and pottery shards I’d arranged there for their benefit.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. We were just then passing a group of urchins goggling at us from an alleyway, and they all, as one, called out his name—and not in mockery or play, but reverentially, in homage. He was,

  I was soon to discover, a kind of hero amongst them.

  “Ten?” he guessed. He was wearing sandals. His feet shone in the glare of the sunlight, kicking out ahead of him on the paving stones. It was very hot.

  “Oh, a hundred or more, I’d say. Of some twenty-six species.” And then, slyly: “If you have the time, I’ll show you them all.”

  Of course, I insisted on first treating the burn as a kind of quid pro quo. It wouldn’t do to have him dying of a bacterial infection, or of anything else for that matter—for humanitarian reasons certainly, but also with respect to the treasure he was carrying for all of mankind. His excitement was palpable as I led him into the moist, dim back room, with its concrete floor and its smell of turned earth and vinegar. The first specimen I showed him—Hadrurus arizonensis pallidus, the giant desert scorpion, some five inches long and nearly indistinguishable in color from the sand it rested on—was clutching a cricket in its pedipalps as I lifted the screen at the top of the terrarium. “This is the largest scorpion in North America,” I told him, “though its venom is rather weak compared to what Centruroides exilicauda delivers. The bark scorpion, that is. They live around here too and they can be very dangerous.”

  All he said was, “I want to see the poison one.”

  I had several specimens in a terrarium set against the back wall and I shut down the lights, pulled the shades and used a black light to show him how they glowed with their own natural phosphorescence. As soon as I flicked on the black light and he’d had a moment to distinguish the creatures’ forms as they crawled round their home, he let out a whoop of delight and insisted on shining it in each of the terraria in succession until he finally led me back to Centruroides. “Would they sting me?” he asked. “If I reached in, I mean?”

  I shrugged. “They might. But they’re shy creatures and like most animals want to avoid any sort of confrontation—and they don’t want to waste their venom. You know, it takes a great deal of caloric resources to make the toxin—they need it for their prey. So they can eat.”

  He turned his face to me in the dark, the glow of the black light erasing his features and lending a strange blue cast to his eyes. “Would I die?” he asked.

  I didn’t like where this was leading�
��and I’m sure you’ve already guessed what was to come, the boy who feels no pain and the creatures who come so well equipped to inflict it—and so I played up the danger. “If one were to sting you, you might become ill, might vomit, might even froth at the mouth. You know what that is, frothing?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, no matter. The fact is, a sting of this species might kill someone very susceptible, an infant maybe, a very old person, but probably not a boy of your age, though it would make you very, very sick—”

  “Would it kill my grandfather?”

  I pictured the grandfather. I’d seen him dozing behind the stall on occasion, an aggregation of bones and skin lesions who must have been in his nineties. “Yes,” I said, “it’s possible—if he was unlucky enough to step on one on his way to the bathroom one night . . .”

  It was then that the bell sounded in the clinic, though we were closed, except for emergencies, during the afternoon. I called for Elvira, but she must have been taking her lunch in the garden or dozing in the apartment upstairs. “Come with me,” I said to the boy and I led him out of the back room, through the examining room and into the office, where I found one of the men of the neighborhood, Dagoberto Domínguez, standing at the counter, his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag and a small slick gobbet of meat, which proved to be the tip of his left index finger, clutched in the other. I forgot all about Dámaso.

  When I’d finished bandaging Señor Domínguez’s wound and sent him off in a taxi to the hospital with the tip of his finger packed in ice, I noticed that the door to the back room stood open. There, in the dark, with the black light glowing in its lunar way, stood little Dámaso, his shirt fluorescing with the forms of my scorpions—half a dozen at least—as they climbed across his back and up and down the avenues of his arms. I didn’t say a word. Didn’t move. Just watched as he casually raised a hand to his neck where my Hadrurus—the giant—had just emerged from the collar of his shirt, and I watched as it stung him, repeatedly, while he held it between two fingers and then tenderly eased it back into its cage.