T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

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?”