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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Anyway, the three of us went down the hill to the village amidst the bird-screech and the smell of dung and cook-fires, and Candi fired up a bowl and passed it round and Poonam and I took our turns, because I figured, why not? The muntjacs could wait till tomorrow, and this, whatever it might turn out to be, was something different at least, not to mention the fact that Poonam was there at my side with her slim, smooth limbs and the revelation of flesh that defined her hipbones and navel. “Do you feel anything?” Candi kept saying. “You want to do another hit? Randall? Poonam?” Half a dozen chickens fanned out across the path and vanished in the undergrowth. The sun inflamed the trees.

  In the village itself—foot-tamped dirt, cane and thatch huts on raised platforms of bamboo, lurking rack-ribbed dogs, more bird-screech—people were preparing the evening meal in their courtyards. The smoke was fragrant with curry and vindaloo, triggering my salivary glands to clench and clench again. A pig gave us a malicious look from beneath one of the huts and I couldn’t help laughing—the thing wouldn’t have even come up to the hocks of one of our Iowa hogs. “What are you talking, drums?” Candi said. “I don’t hear any drums.”

  Overhead, the high-voltage wires bellied between the electric poles, at least half of which we’d had to replace with the new high-resin-compound model that resists rot and termite damage, and you wouldn’t believe what the climate here can do to a piece of creosote-soaked wood stuck in the ground—but don’t get me started. Just looking at the things made my back ache. Poonam was about to say something in response, something cutting or at least impatient—I could tell from the way she bit her underlip—when all at once the drums started up from the rear of the village, where the bachelors had their quarters. There was a hollow booming and then a deeper thump that seemed to ignite a furious, palm-driven rhythm pulsing beneath it. Children began to sprint past us.

  Instantly I was caught up in the excitement. I felt like a kid at the start of the Memorial Day parade, with the high school band warming up the snare drums, the horses beating at the pavement in impatience, and the mayor goosing his white Cadillac convertible with the beauty queen arrayed in back. I’d heard some of the local music before—my best bud in the village, Dakgipa, played a thing like an oversized recorder, and he could really do on it too, knocking out the melodies to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Paranoid Android” as if he’d written them himself—but it was nothing like the ferment of those drums. I glanced at Poonam and she gave me a smile so muscular it showed all her bright, perfect teeth and lifted her right nostril so that her nose ring caught the light and winked at me. “All right,” I said. “Party time!”

  And that was how it went. Everybody knew us—the Garos are not in the least bit standoffish or uptight or whatever you want to call it—and before long we were sitting cross-legged in the courtyard with plates of food in our laps and jars of rice beer in hand while the bachelors went at it on every sort of drum imaginable—the Ambengdama, the Chisakdama, Atong dama, Ruga and Chibok dama, the Nagra and Kram. And gongs. They were big on gongs too. Candi wouldn’t touch the food—she’d been down with one stomach ailment after another, right from orientation on—but she drained that beer as if she were at a kegger on Long Beach Island, while Poonam sat beside me on a clump of grass with her flawless posture and sweet, compressed smile.

  At one point—my recollection isn’t too clear here, I’m afraid, after the weed and the beer, not to mention the flamingest curry I’ve ever yet to this day run across—Dakgipa came and sat with us and we made a date to go hunting the following day after work. Dakgipa spent all his free time out in the bush, snaring squirrels, bandicoots, and the black-napped hare and the like, potting green pigeons in the trees and crow pheasants out in the fields, and he’d acted as a sort of guide for me, teaching me the habits of the local game and helping me tan the hides to ship back home so Jenny and I could stretch them decoratively over the walls of our condo-to-be. There was a quid pro quo, of course—Dak was a Counter-Strike addict and all he could talk about was the DSL capability he fervently hoped we were bringing him and the 10Base-T Ethernet network interface cards he expected we’d hand out to go with the new modems we were seeding the village with. But that was okay. That was cool. He gave me the binturong and the masked palm civet and I gave him the promise of high-speed Internet.

  It grew dark. The mosquitoes settled in for their own feast, and even as the screeching day birds flew off to their roosts the night creatures took up the complaint, which sizzled through the quieter moments of the drummers’ repertoire like some sort of weird natural distortion, as if the gods of the jungle had their amps cranked too high. I was aware of Poonam beside me, Dak was sounding out Candi on the perennial question of Mac versus PC, and the drums had sunk down to the hypnotic pulse of water flowing in its eternal cycle—everything gone calm and mellow. After a long silence, Poonam turned to me. “Did you know the auntie of my host family was carried off by a bhut the other night?”

  I didn’t know. Hadn’t heard. Poonam’s skin glowed in the light of the bonfire somebody had lit while I was dreaming the same dream as the drummers, and her eyes opened up to me so that I wanted to crawl inside them and forever forget Jenny and Des Moines and the Appleseed Condo Corp. Inc. “What’s a bhut?” I asked.

  “A forest spirit.”

  “A what? Don’t tell me you actually—?” I caught myself and never finished the thought. I didn’t want to sound too harsh because we were just starting to have a real meeting of the minds and a meeting of the minds is—or can be, or ought to be—a prelude to a meeting of the flesh.

  Her smile was softer, more serene than ever. “It was in the form of a leopard,” she said. “Bhuts often take on the shape of that sneaking thief of the night. They come for adulterers, Randall, false-promisers, moneylenders, for the loose and easy. Some nights, they just take what they can get.”

  I stared off into the fire, at the shapes that shifted there like souls come to life. “And the auntie—what did she do?”

  Poonam gave an elaborate shrug. “They say she ate the flesh of the forest creatures without making sacrifice. But you’d have to believe, wouldn’t you, to put any credence in a primitive speculation like that?” The drums flowed, things crept unseen through the high grass. “Just think of it, Randall,” she said, rotating her hips so that she was facing me square on, “all these people through all these eons and when they go out to make water at night they might never come back, grandmother vanished on her way to the well, your childhood dog disappeared like smoke, your own children carried off. And you ask me if I believe?”

  Maybe it was the pot, maybe that was it, but suddenly I felt uneasy, as if the whole world were holding its breath and watching me and me alone. “But you said it yourself—it’s only a leopard.”

  “Only?”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. The fact was I’d never shot anything larger than a six-point buck on the edge of a soybean field; the biggest predators we had in Iowa were fox, bobcat, and coyote, nothing that could creep up on you without a sound and crush your skull in its jaws while simultaneously raking out your intestines with swift, knifing thrusts of its hind claws. That was a big “only.”

  “Would you hunt such a thing, Randall? In the night? Would you?”

  —

  Candi was deep in conversation with Dak when Poonam and I excused ourselves to stroll back up the hill to my tent (“Yes,” Dak was saying, “but what sort of throughput speed can you offer?”). I’d felt so mellow and so—detached, I’d guess you’d call it, from Jenny that I found myself leaning into Poonam and putting my lips to her ear just as the drummers leapfrogged up the scale of intensity and the ground and the thatch and even the leaves of the bushes began to vibrate. It was hot. I was sweating from every pore. There was nothing in the world but drums. Drums were my essence, drums were the rain and the sunshine after a storm, they were the beginning and the end, the stars, the deep
s—but I don’t want to get too carried away here. You get the idea: my lips, Poonam’s ear. “Would you—” I began, and I had to shout to hear myself, “I mean, would you want to come back to the tent for a nightcap maybe? With me?”

  She smelled of palm oil—or maybe it was Nivea. She was shy, and so was I. “Yes,” she whispered, the sound all but lost in the tumult around us. But then she shrugged for emphasis and added, “Sure, why not?”

  The night sustained us, the hill melted away. Her hand found mine in the dark. For a long while we sat side by side on my cot, mixing fresh-squeezed lime juice, confectioners’ sugar, and Tanqueray in my only glass and taking turns watching each other drink from it, and then she subsided against me, against my chest and the circulatory organ that was pounding away there—my heart, that is—and eventually I got to see what she looked like without the little knit blouse and the tight jeans and I fell away to the pulse of the drums and the image of a swift, spotted bhut stalking the night.

  —

  I woke with a jolt. It was dark still, the drums silent, the birds and monkeys nodding on their hidden perches, the chirring of the insects fading into the background like white noise. Somewhere, deep in my dream, someone had been screaming—and this was no ordinary scream, no mere wringing out of fear or excitement, but something darker, deeper, more hurtful and wicked—and now, awake, I heard it again. Poonam sat up beside me. “Jesus,” I said. “What was that?”

  She didn’t say I told you so, didn’t say it was a leopard or a bhut or the creeping manifestation of the Christian Devil himself, because there was no time for that or anything else: the platform swayed under the weight of an animate being and I never thought to reach for my rifle or even my boxers. For an interminable time I sat there rigid in the dark, Poonam’s nails digging into my shoulder, neither of us breathing—Jenny, I was thinking, Jenny—until the flaps parted on the gray seep of dawn and Dak thrust his agitated face into the tent. “Randall,” he barked. “Randall—oh, shit! Shit! Have you got your gun, your rifle? Get your rifle. Bring it! Quick!” I could hear the birds now—first one started in and then they were all instantaneously competing to screech it down—and Poonam loosened her grip on my arm.

  “What is it? What’s the problem?” I couldn’t really hear myself, but I have no doubt my voice was unsteady, because on some level—scratch that: on every level—I didn’t want to know and certainly didn’t want to have to go off into the bush after whatever it was that had made that unholy rupture in the fabric of the night.

  Dak’s face just hung there, astonished, a caricature of impatience and exasperation, though I couldn’t see his eyes (for some reason—and this struck me as maybe the oddest thing about the whole situation—he was wearing Candi’s Matrix shades). “The big one,” he said. “The biggest bore you have.”

  “For what? Why? What’s the deal?” Though our entire exchange could have been compacted into the space of maybe ten seconds, I was stalling, no doubt about it.

  His response, delivered through clenched teeth, completely threw me. I don’t know what I’d expected—demons, man-eaters, Bangladeshi terrorists—but probably the last thing was elephants. “Elephants?” I repeated stupidly. To tell you the truth, I’d pretty much forgotten they even had elephants out there in the bush—sure, people still used them to haul things, like telephone poles, for instance, but those elephants were as tame as lapdogs and no more noticeable or threatening than a big gray stucco wall.

  I still hadn’t moved. Poonam shielded herself from Dak—as if, in this moment of fomenting crisis, he would have been interested in the shape of her breasts—and before I’d even reached for my shorts she had the knit blouse over her head and was smoothing it down under her ribcage.

  What had happened, apparently, was that the wild elephants had come thundering out of the jungle at first light to ravage the village and raid the crops. All I could think of were those old Tarzan movies—I mean, really: elephants? “You’re joking, right, Dak?” I said, reaching for my clothes. “It’s like April Fool’s, right—part of the whole Wangala thing? Tell me you’re joking.”

  I’d never heard Dak raise his voice before—he was so together, so calm and focused, he was almost holy—but he raised it now. “Will you fucking wake up to what I’m telling you, Randall—they’re wrecking the place, going for the granary, trampling the fields. Worse—they’re drunk!”

  “Drunk?”

  His face collapsed, his shoulders sank. “They got the rice beer. All of it.”

  —

  And so, that was how I found myself stalking the streets of the village ten minutes later, the very sweaty stock of a very inadequate rifle in my hand. The place was unrecognizable. Trees had been uprooted, the huts crushed, the carcasses of pigs, chickens, and goats scattered like trash. Smoke rose from the ruins where early-morning cook-fires had gone out of control and begun to swallow up the splinters of the huts, even as people ran around frantically with leaking buckets of water. There was one man dead in the street and I’d never seen a dead human being before, both sets of my grandparents having opted for cremation to spare us the mortuary and the open casket and the waxen effigies propped within. He was lying on his face in the dirt, the skin stripped from his back like the husk of a banana, his head radically compressed. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I recognized him as one of the drummers from the previous night. I felt something rise in my throat, a lump of it burning there.

  That was when the villagers caught sight of me, caught sight of the rifle. Within minutes I’d attracted a vengeful, hysterical crowd, everybody jabbering and gesticulating and singing their own little song of woe, and me at the head of the mob, utterly clueless. The rifle in my hands—a 7mm Remington—was no elephant gun. Far from it. It packed some stopping power, sure, and I’d brought it along in the unlikely event I could get a shot at something big, a gaur or maybe even a leopard or (crucify me) a tiger. Back in Ottumwa I suppose I’d entertained a fantasy about coming down some sun-spangled path and seeing a big flat-headed Bengal tiger making off with somebody’s dog and dropping him with a single, perfect heart shot and then paying a bunch of worshipful coolies or natives or whoever they might be to skin it out so Jenny and I could hang it on the wall and I could have a story to tell over the course of the next thousand backyard barbecues. But that was the fantasy and this was the reality. To stop an elephant—even to put a scare into one—you needed a lot more firepower than I had. And experience—experience wouldn’t hurt either.

  The noise level—people squabbling and shouting, the eternal birds, dogs howling—was getting to me. How could anybody expect me to stalk an animal with this circus at my back? I looked around for Dak, hoping he could do something to distract the mob so that I could have some peace to prop myself up and stop the heaviness in my legs from climbing up over my belt and paralyzing me. I’d never been more afraid in my life, and I didn’t know what was worse—having to shoot something the size of a house without getting trampled or looking like a fool, coward and wimp in the face of all these people. Like it or not, I was the one with the gun, the white man, the pukka sahib; I was the torchbearer of Western superiority, the one with everything to prove and everything to lose. How had I gotten myself into this? Just because I liked to hunt? Because I’d potted a bandicoot or two and the entire village knew it? And this wasn’t just one elephant, which would have been bad enough, but a whole herd—and they were drunk, and who knew what that would do to their judgment?

  The crowd pushed me forward like the surge of the tide and I looked in vain for Dak—for a friendly face, for anybody—until finally I spotted him at the rear of the press, with Candi and Poonam at his side, all three of them looking as if they’d just vomited up breakfast. I gave them a sick wave—there was nothing else I could do—and came round a corner to see two other corpses laid out in the street as if they were sleeping on very thin mattresses. And then, suddenly, the crowd fell silent.
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  There before me was an elephant. Or the truck-high back end of one. It was standing in the shell of a hut, its head bent forward as it sucked rice beer up its trunk from an open cask that somehow, crazily, had remained upright through all the preceding chaos. I remember thinking what an amazing animal this was—a kind of animate bulldozer, and it lived right out there in the jungle, invisible to everybody but the birds, as stealthy as a rat—and wondered what we’d do if we had things like this back home, ready to burst out of the river bottom and lay waste to the cornfields on their way to Kenny’s Bar and Grill to tap half a dozen kegs at a time. The thought was short-lived. Because the thing had lifted its head and craned its neck—if it even had a neck—to look back over its shoulder and fan its ears, which were like big tattered flags of flesh. Reflexively I looked over my shoulder and discovered that I was alone—the villagers had cleared off to a distance of five hundred feet, as if the tide had suddenly receded. How did I feel about that? For one thing, it made my legs go even heavier—they were pillars, they were made of concrete, marble, lead, and I couldn’t have run if I’d wanted to. For another, I began a grisly calculation—as long as the crowd had been with me, the elephant would have had a degree of choice as to just who it wanted to obliterate. Now that choice had been drastically reduced.

  Very slowly—infinitely slowly, millimeter by millimeter—I began to move to my right, the rifle at my shoulder, the cartridge in the chamber, my finger frozen at the trigger. I needed to get broadside of the thing, which had gone back to drinking beer now, pausing to snort or to tear up a patch of long grass and beat it against its knees in a nice calm undrunken grandmotherly kind of way that lulled me for an instant. But really, I didn’t have a clue. I remembered the Orwell essay, which Guns & Ammo reprinted every couple of years by way of thrilling the reading public with the fantasy of bringing down the ultimate trophy animal, and how Orwell said he’d thought the thing’s brain was just back of the eyes. My right arm felt as if it was in a cast. My trigger finger swelled up to the size of a baseball bat. I couldn’t seem to breathe.