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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I’d just set down my overnight bag and taken possession of the bed, as uninterested in these women as I’d been in the phalanxes that had trooped in and out of my cage at the men’s compound, when one of them broke ranks and came across the dirt floor to me, my name on her lips. She was Magdalena Duarte, she’d been raised in the city I called home and—in a shy voice—told me she’d often come to the drawbridge to watch me at work when she was just a girl. “Before my growth spurt,” she said, covering her mouth with one hand as she laughed at her own joke.

  Later, after we’d coupled by rote while the insects whined and the other women, utterly indifferent, unfurled straw mats and lay down to sleep, she asked me how I was adjusting to my new role in life. Did I like it?

  “Anything for the President,” I said.

  Her voice was soft, with a scratch in it. “All work and no play, eh?”

  “Something like that. But what of you—do you like serving your country?”

  I could just make out her features in the light of the guard tower where it fell across the wire mesh of the cage. She glowed a moment, her face like a moon rising over a dim horizon. “They move us to a nicer place once we’re pregnant,” she said. “And the stipend is all my parents have to live on in these times. You see, I come from a large family”—she caught herself, giggled softly—“of many children, that is, thirteen of us, and so when the recruiter came to us, I did my duty. To the President, yes, and to my family as well.”

  I was quiet a moment, thinking about that—duty—when she dropped her voice even lower and whispered: “You know, there’s another compound. Two other compounds.”

  “No,” I said, “I had no idea.” Beside us, in the dark, the giantesses heaved and blew and let their stertorous snores crash through their dreams.

  “For little people.”

  “Little? What do you mean little?” Forgive me if in that moment I thought of Rosa, my Rosa, my Rosita, and her perfect diminutive feet that were the size of a child’s, of her mouth, her lips, the way she would tease me good-naturedly every time I had to bend double and squeeze sideways through a doorway or avoid the chairs in her parents’ parlor for fear of splintering them.

  “Not dwarves, not midgets—the President wants normal stock only—but people who, by the grace or whim of God, are very fine and very small.” She left the thought hanging there, the darkness seizing me, the mosquitoes raging till the furious cacophony of their wings drove down every sound in that place.

  “But why? Why would he want—little people?”

  I couldn’t see anything but her face in the mosaic shadow of the wire, but I could feel her shrug animate the mattress. “They say he wants to create a race no more than two feet high and normal in every other way, intelligent, active, people like cats who can come and go in the night without detection.”

  “Spies?”

  Another shift of the mattress. She was nodding now. “Our fatherland has many enemies,” she said, whispering still, as if fearful of being overheard. “We must be ready for them.”

  —

  I couldn’t sleep that night, not a wink, not after what Magdalena had told me. I kept picturing Rosa in a camp like this one, stepping into a cage where a wiry little man like a human Chihuahua lay waiting for her, though I knew it was absurd. Rosa was an innocent. She would never volunteer, never allow herself to be conscripted no matter what pressures were brought to bear. Or would she? Would she feel moved in her heart (in her loins!) to serve her country like all these patriotic women laid out snoring in the darkness around me? The thought seared me, burned in my brain like the perpetual flame illuminating the grave of our President’s lamented mother. It was dawn by the time I finally dozed off, my dreams poisoned and my heart constricted as if a noose had been drawn tight around it.

  After that, I bided my time, and when they moved us back to our new apartments in the men’s compound—the very night—I broke out again. This time I went straight for the bus terminal and soon experienced the giddy release of the wheels revolving beneath me as a dark curtain of vegetation lurched past the windows and the striped margins of the road home came clear in the first light of dawn. What I didn’t yet appreciate was that after our first abortive attempt at escape the Colonel had issued an alert to all carriers to be on the lookout for any big man seeking passage out of the province. They were waiting for me at the end of the line.

  Did I go quietly? No, I didn’t. When I saw them there in their Black Maria with its chopping blue light, I came down off the bus like a hurricane and laid that vehicle over on its roof till the men it contained came crawling out the windows and I snatched them up two at a time and flung them behind me like so many paper dolls. Sadly, they’d anticipated me here too, and their chloroform canisters brought me down as swiftly and surely as if I were that king ape in the cinema show we’d all marveled at in simpler times, when the images played across the screen like waking dreams and Rosa breathed quietly at my side.

  —

  I awoke in a damp subterranean place that smelled of the raw dirt of the floor and the whitewash slathered over the rough stone of the walls. Here was a huge vault of a room, lit dimly by a pair of gray bulbs in wall sconces, a silent place where no one would hear my cries of outrage or pleas for freedom. I was laid out on my back on one of the big industrial-strength beds, and my hands and ankles were bound up in chains—and not merely run-of-the-mill chains, but the heavy steel links they use to moor boats in the harbor of my ancestral home by the sea. It took me no more than sixty seconds to intuit where I was—that is, in the basement of the three-story brick building where the Colonel had his offices overlooking the poor huts and open sewers of the village beyond. If I listened carefully I could hear the sound of footsteps on the floor above and of a chair rolling back and forth on its casters. I tugged at my chains, of course, but they held me fast, secured not to the posts of the bed but to the great ceiba pillars that rose out of the shadows at the four corners of the room to disappear in the ceiling above.

  Almost as soon as I opened my eyes a door swung to at the far end of the room and a woman entered bearing a tray of food. She was of average height and weight, this woman—no Amazon—and as I soon discovered, it was her task to spoon-feed me as I lay there under the burden of my chains. “Release me,” I whispered, but she shook her head. “Just one hand—so I can eat. I feel like an infant lying here. Please. I beg you.” She shook her head again and pressed a spoonful of the rich seafood stew we know as zarzuela to my lips. If I’d had any notion of refusing it, of going on a hunger strike in protest of the way I was being treated—mistreated—the scent and taste of that zarzuela drove it away. You can’t begin to imagine what it takes to fuel the cells of this body that entraps me. I ate. Ate hungrily and gladly.

  And then the women started coming to me, three a day, morning, afternoon and evening, the big women, the giantesses, lowering themselves over me as I lay chained and helpless beneath them. Did I want to perform the act? No. But I was devoured by lust, perpetually aroused, no matter that I was rebelling inside or that I found the women gross and the task odious. They must have been putting something in my food—one of the coarse brown powders easily attainable at any Chinese herbalist’s shop, the ground horn of the rhinoceros or the friable bones of the tiger infused in alcohol. The women came. I stared at the ceiling. My rage grew.

  It must have been the third or fourth day when the Colonel appeared. He was seated in a wicker chair drawn up to my bed as I awakened one afternoon from a bludgeoning dream and he began lecturing me without preliminary. “You may be interested to know,” he said, “that you’ve obtained excellent results, superior, the best of your cadre.”

  “Release me,” I said, my voice tense and caught deep in my throat.

  He was studying a notepad. He took a minute to smooth the top sheet with his fingers. “Some seventy-six percent of the women you’ve”—he broke off, se
arching for the right phrase—“been with have become impregnated. Congratulations.”

  “If you release me, I promise, I swear on my mother’s soul, that I will do my duty without complaint, without—”

  He held up a hand. “Speaking of your mother, she’s doing very well for herself, better than she’s ever done in all her life, thanks to the stipend you’re providing. She appreciates your service, as does the President.” Here he leaned in close to me and I saw that a small glittering object was dangling by a ribbon from his right hand—a medal, such as the military doles out to its heroes. In the next moment I felt the pressure of his fingers as he pinned it to the breast of my shirt. “You’ll be released in good time,” he said, “so that you can go back to the compound where you’ll be more comfortable, but we all feel that for the present, given your, what shall we say, recalcitrance, not to mention dereliction of duty, you’ll be better off here. Really, it’s for your own good. And the President’s too, that goes without saying.”

  Later, in my boredom and the solitude that ground me down till my consciousness floated free—Rosa, Rosa, where are you?—I shifted my neck and forced my head as far back against the pillow as it would go so that I was able to squint down the vast slope of my chest and get a look at the medal the President had devised as a token of his gratitude. Dangling from the ribbon was a figure cast in metal—either gold or brass, I never did discover which. It took me a moment—squinting, as I say—to see what it represented: a bull, rampant, with a thin golden puff of steam spewing from his nostrils.

  That was it. That was the end. I didn’t care what became of me after that, but I knew then that I hadn’t been born on this earth to serve anybody, let alone the President, that I didn’t love him, didn’t even know him, and that the rage building in me, beat by beat, was a force no man could contain, not even a giant. I waited till the mute who served me had left with the remains of the evening meal and the last giantess had done with me and waddled her way out the door, and then I went deep inside myself, working like a Hindu fakir through every cell of my body, from my smallest toes to the truncheons of my legs and my torso that was like a bucket of iron and on up to my shoulders, my biceps and forearms and down into the reservoirs of my fingers, one digit at a time.

  Then I began worrying the chain that bound my right arm, thrusting and jerking back again, over and over, through a thousand repetitions, till finally it gave way and the arm was free. After that, it was easy. I came up off the bed, chains rattling loose around me, telling tales, and if the guard who must have been watching through a hidden peephole came hurtling into the room, I barely noticed. I could have gone through the door and taken the guard with me, but I didn’t. No, I just leaned into the nearest pillar and shoved till the whole edifice began to quake and quake again.

  —

  That was six months ago. I wasn’t blinded, no one cut my hair, and when the building came down around me—inferior construction; the termites would have got to it if I hadn’t—I found a pocket of air trapped beneath a beam and was spared. I dug my own way out and if the authorities presumed I was buried beneath the rubble, along with the Colonel and his functionaries and the great glistening oil portrait of the President, I wasn’t about to disabuse them. This time I avoided public transport, making my way home in the depths of a freight car designed to carry livestock from one place to another.

  Rosa and I escaped to the high fractured plains caught fast in the mountains that separate our country from that of our enemies to the south, where we are living now as man and wife in a village populated by Indians whose teeth are eroded by the leaves they chew to give them energy in the high altitudes where they must scrape a poor living from the earth. I earn my own keep here through main strength, as I always have, hauling loads up and down the stony trails that vanish around each bend and drop off thousands of feet to the distant featureless land below. Am I a beast of burden? Yes. But I’m nobody’s beast but my own. And Rosa’s. Rosa is pregnant now, incidentally, and if we’re lucky she’ll bear our first son come spring, and if we’re even luckier he’ll be neither giant nor dwarf, but something in between. As for me, I try to keep my head down and avoid attracting notice, but inevitably they’ll find me, I know that. How could anybody, let alone a man like me, expect to blend in in a land where the people are so very, very small?

  (2011)

  The Way You Look Tonight

  He was in the teachers’ lounge, seven-fifteen a.m., sipping the latte he’d picked up on his way to work and checking his e-mail before classes started, when he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen. His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzlement to fear—in the instant he recognized what it was (a blur of color, harsh light, movement) he hit escape and shot a look round the room to see if anyone had noticed. No one had. The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour, and those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops and looking as if they’d been drained of blood overnight. It was Monday. The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started in just before dawn. The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.

  All of a sudden he was angry. What had Rob been thinking? He could be fired. Would be. In a heartbeat. The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course, just to square up the parameters. Downloading porn? At your workplace? That was so far beyond the pale the course didn’t even mention it. His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped. He clicked on the next message—some asinine joke his college roommate had sent out to everybody he’d ever known, all thirty or so of them with their e-mail addresses bunched at the top of the screen—and deleted it before getting to the punchline. Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his appointment at three-thirty, after school let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap—orphans in Haiti, Viagra, An Opportunity Too Unique To Miss Out On—which he hammered with the delete key, one after another, with a mounting irascibility that made Eugenie McCaffrey, the math teacher, look up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen. Rob had left no message, just the video. And the subject heading: I Thought You’d Want To Know.

  By lunch he’d forgotten all about it, but when he checked his phone messages there was a text from Rob, which read only: ?????? Sandwich in hand, the noontime buzz of the lounge reverberating round him—food, caffeine, two periods to go—he called Rob’s number, but there was no answer and the message box was full. Of course. He summoned his brother’s face, the hipster haircut, the goofball grin, eyes surfing the crest of some private joke—when was he going to grow up?—then dialed Laurie at work because it came to him suddenly that they were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with one of her co-workers and her husband, whom he’d never met, and he was wondering how that might or might not interfere with the football game on TV, but she didn’t answer either.

  Then the day was over and he was in his car, heading to the dentist’s. The drizzle had given way to a drifting haze that admitted the odd column of sunlight so that the last he saw of the school, for today at least, was a brightly lit shot of glowing white stucco and orange-tile roof rapidly dwindling in the rearview mirror. Traffic was light and he was fifteen minutes early for the dentist, whose office was on the second floor of a vaguely Tudorish building that anchored an open-air mall—bank below, Italian restaurant with outdoor seating bottom floor left, then a realtor and a sandwich shop and on and on all the way round the U-shaped perimeter. A patch of lawn divided the parking lot. There were the usual shrubs and a pair of long-necked palms rising out of the grass to let you know you weren’t in Kansas, appearances to the contrary.

  He debated whether to drift over to the sandwich shop for a bite of something, but thought better of it, remembering the time the dentist had chastised him in a high singsong voice because he hadn’t brushed after lunch, the poi
nt of which had escaped him, since he’d been coming in to get his teeth cleaned in any case. The thought made him shift the rearview and pull back his lips in a grimace to study his gums and then work a fingernail between his front teeth, after which he took a swig of bottled water and swished it around in his mouth before rolling down the window and spitting it out. That was just the way he was, he supposed—the kind of person who did what was expected of him, who wanted to smooth things out and take the path of least resistance. Unlike Rob.

  It was then that he thought of the video. He looked round him, his blood quickening, but no one was paying any attention to him. The cars on either side were empty and the only movement was at the door of the bank, where every few minutes someone would come in or out and the guard stationed there (slab-faced, heavy in the haunches, older—forty, forty-five, it was hard to say) would casually nod his head in recognition. Shielding the laptop with the back of the seat and the baffle of his own torso, he brought up the video—porn, he was watching porn right there in the dentist’s parking lot where anybody could see, and he wasn’t thinking about students or students’ parents or the rent-a-cop at the bank or the real thing either, because all at once the world had been reduced to the dimensions of the screen on the seat beside him.

  He saw an anonymous room, a bed, the incandescence of too-white flesh and the sudden thrust of bodies cohering as the scene came into focus. In the center of the bed was the woman, on all fours, the man standing behind her and working at her, his eyes closed and his face drawn tight with concentration. The woman had her head down so that her own face was hidden by the spill of her hair, red-gold hair parted in the middle and swaying rhythmically as she rocked back into him. He saw her shoulders flex and release, her fingers spread and wrists stiffen against the white field of the sheets, and then she lifted her head and he saw her face and the shock of it made something surge up and beat inside of him with a fierce sudden clangor that was like the pounding of a mallet on a steel rail. He watched as she stared into the camera, her eyes receding beneath the weight of the moment—Laurie’s eyes, his wife’s—and then he slapped the screen shut. I Thought You’d Want To Know.