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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was Mrs. Singh who named them, some weeks later. They were pitiful, filthy, soiled with their own urine and excrement, undernourished and undersized. They had to be caged to keep them from harming the other children, and Mrs. Singh, though it broke her heart to do it, ordered them put in restraints so that the filth and the animal smell could be washed from them, even as their heads were shaved to defeat the ticks and fleas they’d inherited from the only mother they’d ever known. “They need delicate names,” Mrs. Singh told her husband, “names to reflect the beauty and propriety they will grow into.” She named the younger sister Amala, after a bright yellow flower native to Bengal, and she named the elder Kamala, after the lotus that blossoms deep in the jungle pools.

  Running with the Pack

  The sun stroked her like a hand, penetrated and massaged the dark yellowing contusion that had sprouted on the left side of her ribcage. Her bones felt as if they were about to crack open and deliver their marrow and her heart was still pounding, but she was here, among the dogs, at rest, and all that was winding down now. It was June, the season of pollen, the air supercharged with the scents of flowering, seeding, fruiting, and there were rabbits and squirrels everywhere. She lay prone at the lip of the den and watched the pups—long-muzzled like their mother and brindled Afghan peach and husky silver—as they worried a flap of skin and fur that Snout had peeled off the hot black glistening surface of the road and dropped at their feet. She was trying to focus on the dogs—on A.1., curled up nose to tail in the trampled weeds after regurgitating a mash of kibble for the pups, on Decidedly, his eyes half-closed as currents of air brought him messages from afar, on Humper and Factitious—but she couldn’t let go of the pain in her ribs and what that pain foreshadowed from the human side of things.

  Don had kicked her. Don had climbed out of the car, crossed the field and stood over her in his suede computer-engineer’s ankle boots with the waffle bottoms and reinforced toes and lectured her while the dogs slunk low and rumbled deep in their throats. And, as his voice had grown louder, so too had the dogs’ voices, till they were a chorus commenting on the ebb and flow of the action. When was she going to get her ass up out of the dirt and act like a normal human being? That was what he wanted to know. When was she going to cook a meal, run the vacuum, do the wash—his underwear, for Christ’s sake? He was wearing dirty underwear, did she know that?

  She had been lying stretched out flat on the mound, just as she was now. She glanced up at him as the dogs did, taking in a piece of him at a time, no direct stares, no challenges. She was in no mood. “All I want,” she said, over the chorus of growls and low, warning barks, “is to be left alone.”

  “Left alone?” His voice tightened in a little yelp. “Left alone? You need help, that’s what you need. You need a shrink, you know that?”

  She didn’t reply. She let the pack speak for her. The rumble of their response, the flattened ears and stiffened tails, the sharp, savage gleam of their eyes should have been enough, but Don wasn’t attuned. The sun seeped into her. A grasshopper she’d been idly watching as it bent a dandelion under its weight suddenly took flight, right past her face, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to snap at it and break it between her teeth.

  Don let out some sort of exclamation—“My God, what are you doing? Get up out of that, get up out of that now!”—and it didn’t help matters. The dogs closed in. They were fierce now, barking in savage recusancy, their emotions twisted in a single cord. But this was Don, she kept telling herself, Don from grad school, bright and buoyant Don, her mate, her husband, and what harm was there in that? He wanted her back home, back in the den, and that was his right. The only thing was, she wasn’t going.

  “This isn’t research. This is bullshit. Look at you!”

  “No,” she said, giving him a lazy, sidelong look, though her heart was racing, “it’s dog shit. It’s on your shoes, Don. It’s in your face. In your precious computer—”

  That was when he’d kicked her. Twice, three times maybe. Kicked her in the ribs as if he were driving a ball over an imaginary set of uprights in the distance, kicked and kicked again—before the dogs went for him. A.1. came in first, tearing at a spot just above his right knee, and then Humper, the bulldog who belonged to the feathery old lady up the block, got hold of his pantleg while Barely went for the crotch. Don screamed and thrashed all right—he was a big animal, two hundred and ten pounds, heavier by far than any of the dogs—and he threatened in his big-animal voice and fought back with all the violence of his big-animal limbs, but he backed off quickly enough, threatening still, as he made his way across the field and into the car. She heard the door slam, heard the motor scream, and then there was the last thing she heard: Snout barking at the wheels as the wheels revolved and took Don down the street and out of her life.

  Survival of the Fittest

  “You know he’s locked her out, don’t you?”

  “Who?” Though he knew perfectly well.

  “Don. I’m talking about Don and the dog lady?”

  There was the table, made of walnut varnished a century before, the crystal vase full of flowers, the speckless china, the meat, the vegetables, the pasta. Softly, so softly he could barely hear it, there was Bach too, piano pieces—partitas—and the smell of the fresh-cut flowers.

  “Nobody knows where she’s staying, unless it’s out in the trash or the weeds or wherever. She’s like a bag lady or something. And what she’s eating. Bea said Jerrilyn Hunter said she saw her going through the trash at dawn one morning. Do you hear me? Are you even listening?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He’d been reading lately. About dogs. Half a shelf of books from the library in their plastic covers—behavior, breeds, courting, mating, whelping. He excised a piece of steak and lifted it to his lips. “Did you hear the Leibowitzes’ Afghan had puppies?”

  “Puppies? What in God’s name are you talking about?” Her face was like a burr under the waistband, an irritant, something that needed to be removed and crushed.

  “Only the alpha couple gets to breed, you know that, right? And so that would be the husky and the Leibowitzes’ Afghan, and I don’t know who the husky belongs to—but they’re cute, real cute.”

  “You haven’t been—? Don’t tell me. Julian, use your sense: she’s out of her mind. You want to know what else Bea said?”

  “The alpha bitch,” he said, and he didn’t know why he was telling her this, “she’ll actually hunt down and kill the pups of any other female in the pack who might have got pregnant, a survival of the fittest kind of thing—”

  “She’s crazy, bonkers, out of her fucking mind, Julian. They’re going to have her committed, you know that? If this keeps up. And it will keep up, won’t it, Julian? Won’t it?”

  The Common Room at Midnapore

  At first they would take nothing but water. The wolf pups, from which they’d been separated for reasons both of sanitation and acculturation, eagerly fed on milk-and-rice pap in their kennel in one of the outbuildings, but neither of the girls would touch the pan-warmed milk or rice or the stewed vegetables Mrs. Singh provided for them—even at night, when they were most active and their eyes spoke a language of desire all their own. Each morning and each evening before retiring, she would place a bowl on the floor in front of them, trying to tempt them with biscuits, confections, even a bit of boiled meat, though the Singhs were vegetarians themselves and repudiated the slaughter of animals for any purpose. The girls drew back into the recesses of the pen the Reverend had constructed in the orphanage’s common room, showing their teeth. Days passed. They grew weaker. He tried to force-feed them balls of rice, but they scratched and tore at him with their nails and their teeth, setting up such a furious caterwauling of hisses, barks and snarls as to give rise to rumors among the servants that he was torturing them—or trying to exorcise the forest demons that inhabited them, as if he, an educated man, had g
iven in to the superstitions of the tribesmen. Finally, in resignation, and though it was a risk to the security of the entire orphanage, he left the door to the pen standing open in the hope that the girls, on seeing the other small children at play and at dinner, would soften.

  In the meanwhile, though the girls grew increasingly lethargic—or perhaps because of it—the Reverend was able to make a close and telling examination of their physiology and habits. Their means of locomotion had transformed their bodies in a peculiar way. For one thing, they had developed thick pads of callus at their elbows and knees, and toes that were of abnormal strength and inflexibility—indeed, when their feet were placed flat on the ground, all five toes stood up at a sharp angle. Their waists were narrow and extraordinarily supple, like a dog’s, and their necks dense with the muscle that had accrued there as a result of leading with their heads. And they were fast, preternaturally fast, and stronger by far than any other child of their respective ages the Reverend and his wife had ever seen. In his diary, for the sake of posterity, the Reverend noted it all down.

  Still, all the notes in the world wouldn’t matter a whit if the wolf children didn’t end their hunger strike, if that was what this was, and the Reverend and his wife had begun to lose hope for them, when the larger one—the one who would become known as Kamala—finally asserted herself. It was early in the evening, the day after the Reverend had ordered the door to the pen left open, and the children were eating their evening meal while Mrs. Singh and one of the servants looked on and the Reverend settled in with his pipe on the veranda. The weather was typical for Bengal in that season, the evening heavy and close, every living thing locked in the grip of the heat, nothing moving, not even the birds, and all the mission’s doors and windows stood open to receive even the faintest breath of a breeze. Suddenly, without warning, Kamala bolted out of the pen, through the door and across the courtyard to where the orphanage dogs were being fed scraps of uncooked meat, gristle and bone left over from the preparation of the servants’ meal, and before anyone could stop her she was down among them, slashing with her teeth, fighting off even the biggest and most aggressive of them until she’d bolted the red meat and carried off the long, hoofed shinbone of a gaur to gnaw in the farthest corner of her pen.

  And so the Singhs, though it revolted them, fed the girls on raw meat until the crisis had passed, and then they gave them broth, which the girls lapped from their bowls, and finally meat that had been at least partially cooked. As for clothing—clothing for decency’s sake—the girls rejected it as unnatural and confining, tearing any garment from their backs and limbs with their teeth, until Mrs. Singh hit on the idea of fashioning each of them a single tight-fitting strip of cloth they wore knotted round the waist and drawn up over their privates, a kind of diaper or loincloth they were forever soiling with their waste. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but the Singhs were patient—the girls had suffered a kind of deprivation no other humans had ever suffered—and they understood that the ascent to civilization and light would be steep and long.

  When Amala died, shortly after the wolf pups succumbed to what the Reverend presumed was distemper communicated through the orphanage dogs, her sister wouldn’t let anyone approach the body. Looking back on it, the Reverend would see this as Kamala’s most human moment—she was grieving, grieving because she had a soul, because she’d been baptized before the Lord and was no wolfling or jungle bhut but a human child after all, and here was the proof of it. But poor Amala. Her, they hadn’t been able to save. Both girls had been dosed with sulfur powder, which caused them to expel a knot of roundworms up to six inches in length and as thick as the Reverend’s little finger, but the treatment was perhaps too harsh for the three-year-old, who was suffering from fever and dysentery at the same time. She’d seemed all right, feverish but calm, and Mrs. Singh had tended her through the afternoon and evening. But when the Reverend’s wife came into the pen in the morning, Kamala flew at her, raking her arms and legs and driving her back from the straw in which the cold body of her sister lay stretched out like a figure carved of wood. They restrained the girl and removed the corpse while Mrs. Singh retired to bandage her wounds and the Reverend locked the door of the pen to prevent any further violence. All that day Kamala lay immobile in the shadows at the back of the pen, wrapped in her own limbs. And then night fell, and she sat back on her haunches behind the rigid geometry of the bars and began to howl, softly at first, and then with increasing force and plangency until it was the very sound of desolation itself, rising up out of the compound to chase through the streets of the village and into the jungle beyond.

  Going to the Dogs

  The sky was clear all the way to the top of everything, the sun so thick in the trees he thought it would catch there and congeal among the motionless leaves. He didn’t know what prompted him to do it exactly, but as he came across the field he balanced first on one leg, and then the other, to remove his shoes and socks. The grass—the weeds, wildflowers, puffs of mushroom, clover, swaths of moss—felt clean and cool against the lazy progress of his bare feet. Butterflies shifted and flapped, grasshoppers shone gold, the false bees hung suspended from invisible wires. Things rose up to greet him, things and smells he’d forgotten all about, and he took his time among them, moving forward only to be distracted again and again. He found her finally in the tall nodding weeds that concealed the entrance of the den, playing with the puppies. He didn’t say hello, didn’t say anything—just settled in on the mound beside her and let the pups surge into his arms. The pack barely raised its collective head.

  Her eyes came to him and went away again. She was smiling, a loose, private smile that curled the corners of her mouth and lifted up into the smooth soft terrain of the silken skin under her eyes. Her clothes barely covered her anymore, the turtleneck torn at the throat and sagging across one clavicle, the black jeans hacked off crudely—or maybe chewed off—at the peaks of her thighs. The sneakers were gone altogether, and he saw that the pale yellow soles of her feet were hard with callus, and her hair—her hair was struck with sun and shining with the natural oil of her scalp.

  He’d come with the vague idea—or no, the very specific idea—of asking her for one of the pups, but now he didn’t know if that would do exactly. She would tell him that the pups weren’t hers to give, that they belonged to the pack, and though each of the pack’s members had a bed and a bowl of kibble awaiting it in one of the equitable houses of the alphabetical grid of the development springing up around them, they were free here, and the pups, at least, were slaves to no one. He felt the thrusting wet snouts of the creatures in his lap, the surge of their animacy, the softness of the stroked ears and the prick of the milk teeth, and he smelled them too, an authentic smell compounded of dirt, urine, saliva and something else also: the unalloyed sweetness of life. After a while, he removed his shirt, and so what if the pups carried it off like a prize? The sun blessed him. He loosened his belt, gave himself some breathing room. He looked at her, stretched out beside him, at the lean, tanned, running length of her, and he heard himself say, finally, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk,” she said. “You’ll spoil it.”

  “Right,” he said. “Right. You’re right.”

  And then she rolled over, bare flesh from the worried waistband of her cutoffs to the dimple of her breastbone and her breasts caught somewhere in between, under the yielding fabric. She was warm, warm as a fresh-drawn bath, the touch of her communicating everything to him, and the smell of her too—he let his hand go up under the flap of material and roam over her breasts, and then he bent closer, sniffing.

  Her eyes were fixed on his. She didn’t say anything, but a low throaty rumble escaped her throat.

  Waiting for the Rains

  The Reverend Singh sat there on the veranda, waiting for the rains. He’d set his notebook aside, and now he leaned back in the wicker chair and pulled meditatively at his pipe. The children were at play in t
he courtyard, an array of flashing limbs and animated faces attended by their high, bright catcalls and shouts. The heat had loosened its grip ever so perceptibly, and they were all of them better for it. Except Kamala. She was indifferent. The chill of winter, the damp of the rains, the full merciless sway of the sun—it was all the same to her. His eyes came to rest on her where she lay across the courtyard in a stripe of sunlight, curled in the dirt with her knees drawn up beneath her and her chin resting atop the cradle of her crossed wrists. He watched her for a long while as she lay motionless there, no more aware of what she was than a dog or an ass, and he felt defeated, defeated and depressed. But then one of the children called out in a voice fluid with joy, a moment of triumph in a game among them, and the Reverend couldn’t help but shift his eyes and look.

  (2002)

  The Kind Assassin

  What you hope for

  Is that at some point of the pointless journey . . .

  The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead

  And blow your brains out.

  —Richard Wilbur

  I was having trouble getting to sleep. Nothing serious, just the usual tossing and turning, the pillow converted to stone, every whisper of the night amplified to a shriek. I heard the refrigerator click on in the kitchen, the soft respiration of the dust-clogged motor that kept half a six-pack, last week’s takeout Chinese and the crusted jar of capers at a safe and comfortable temperature, and then I heard it click off. Every seven and a half minutes—I timed it by the glowing green face of the deep-sea diver’s watch my ex-wife gave me for Christmas last year—the neighbors’ dog let out a single startled yelp, and twenty seconds later I heard the car of some drunk or shift worker laboring up the hill with an intermittent wheeze and blast of exhaust (and couldn’t anybody in this neighborhood afford a new car—or at least a trip to the muffler shop?). It was three o’clock in the morning. Then it was four. I tried juggling invisible balls, repeating the names of my elementary school teachers, Mrs. Gold, Mrs. Cochrane, Miss Mandia, Miss Slivovitz, summoned their faces, the faces of as many of my classmates as I could remember, the faces of everybody in the neighborhood where I grew up, of everybody in New York, California, China, but it didn’t do any good. I fell asleep ten minutes before the alarm hammered me back to consciousness.