T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

And if I ever catch him here again, I’ll give him such a whipping—”

He caught himself even as I flashed my bitterest smile. “You don’t know, but I have my ways. And if I can’t beat him, I can beat you, Doctor, with all respect. And you’ll feel it like any other man.”

“Are you threatening me? Elvira”—I turned to her—“take note.”

“You bet your ass I am,” he said.

And then, quite simply, the boy disappeared. He didn’t come into the clinic the following morning or the morning after that. I asked Elvira about it and she shrugged as if to say, “It’s just as well.” But it wasn’t. I found that I missed having him around, and not simply for selfish reasons (Jerry Lemongello had written to say that the DNA sample was unusable and to implore me to take another), but because I’d developed a genuine affection for him. I enjoyed explaining things to him, lifting him up out of the stew of misinformation and illiteracy into which he’d been born, and if I saw him as following in my footsteps as a naturalist or even a physician, I really didn’t think I was deluding myself. He was bright, quick-witted, with a ready apprehension of the things around him and an ability to observe closely, so that, for instance, when I placed a crab, a scorpion and a spider on a tray before him he was able instantly to discern the relationship between them and apply the correct family, genus and species names I’d taught him. And all this at nine years of age.

On the third morning, when there was still no sign of him, I went to the Funes stall in the marketplace, hoping to find him there.

It was early yet and Mercedes Funes was just laying the kindling on the brazier while half a dozen slabs of freshly (or at least recently) slaughtered goat hung from a rack behind her (coated, I might add, in flies). I called out a greeting and began, in a circuitous way, to ask about her health, the weather and the quality of her goat, when at some point she winced with pain and put her hand to her back, slowly straightening up to shoot me what I can only call a hostile look. “He’s gone off to live with his grandmother,” she said. “In Guadalajara.”

And that was that. No matter how hard I pressed, Mercedes Funes would say no more, nor would her donkey of a husband, and when they had the odd medical emergency they went all the way to the other side of the village to the clinic of my rival, Dr. Octavio Díaz, whom I detest heartily, though that’s another story. Suffice to say that some years went by before I saw Dámaso again, though I heard the rumors — we all did — that his father was forcing him to travel from town to town like a freak in a sideshow, shamelessly exploiting his gift for the benefit of every gaping rube with a few pesos in his pocket. It was a pity. It was criminal. But there was nothing that I or ferry Lemongello or all the regents of Boise State University could do about it. He was gone and we remained.

Another generation of doves came to sit on the wires, Elvira put on weight around the middle and in the hollow beneath her chin, and as I shaved each morning I watched the inevitable progress of the white hairs as they crept up along the slope of my jowls and into my sideburns and finally colonized the crown of my head. I got up from bed, ran the water in the sink and saw a stranger staring back at me in the mirror, an old man with a blunted look in his reconstituted eyes. I diagnosed measles and mumps and gonorrhea, kneaded the flesh of the infirm, plied otoscope, syringe and tongue depressor as if the whole business were some rarefied form of punishment in a Sophoclean drama. And then one afternoon, coming back from the pet shop with a plastic sack of crickets for my brood, I turned a corner and there he was.

A crowd of perhaps forty or fifty people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the Gómez bakery, shifting from foot to foot in the aspiring heat. They seemed entranced — none of them so much as glanced at me as I worked my way to the front, wondering what it was all about. When I spotted Francisco Funes, the blood rushed to my face. He was standing to one side of a makeshift stage — half a dozen stacked wooden pallets — gazing out on the crowd with a calculating look, as if he were already counting up his gains, and on the stage itself, Dámaso, shirtless, shoeless, dressed only in a pair of clinging shorts that did little to hide any part of his anatomy, was heating the blade of a pearl-handled knife over a charcoal brazier till it glowed red. He was stuck all over like a kind of hedgehog with perhaps twenty of those stainless steel skewers people use for making shish kebab, including one that projected through both his cheeks, and I watched in morbid fascination as he lifted the knife from the brazier and laid the blade flat against the back of his hand so that you could hear the sizzling of the flesh. A gasp went up from the crowd. A woman beside me fainted into the arms of her husband. I did nothing. I only watched as Dámaso, his body a patchwork of scars, found a pinch of skin over his breastbone and thrust the knife through it.

I wanted to cry out the shame of it, but I held myself in check.

At the climactic moment I turned and faded away into the crowd, waiting my chance. The boy — he was an adolescent now, thirteen or fourteen, I calculated — performed other feats of senseless torture I won’t name here, and then the hat went round, the pesos were collected, and father and son headed off in the direction of their house. I followed at a discreet distance, the crickets rasping against the sides of the bag. I watched the father enter the house — it was grander now, with several new rooms already framed and awaiting the roofer’s tar paper and tiles — as the boy went to a yellow plastic cooler propped up against the front steps, extracted a bottle of Coca-Cola and lowered himself into the battered armchair on the porch as if he were a hundred and fifty years old.

I waited a moment, till he’d finished his poor reward and set the bottle down between his feet, and then I strolled casually past the house as if I just happened to be in the neighborhood. When I drew even with him — when I was sure he’d seen me — I stopped in my tracks and gave him an elaborate look of surprise, a double take, as it were. “Dámaso?” I exclaimed. “Can it really be you?”

I saw something light up in his eyes, but only the eyes — he seemed incapable of forming a smile with his lips. In the next moment he was out of the chair and striding across the yard to me, holding out his hand in greeting. “Doctor,” he said, and I saw the discoloration of the lips, the twin pinpoints of dried blood on either cheek amidst a battlefield of annealed scars, and I couldn’t have felt more shock and pity if he were indeed my own son.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

My mind was racing. All I could think of was how to get him out of there before Francisco Funes stepped through the door.

“Would you like to come over to the clinic with me — for dinner? For old times’ sake? Elvira’s making an eggplant lasagna tonight, with a nice crisp salad and fried artichokes, and look”—I held up the bag of crickets and gave it a shake—“we can feed the scorpions. Did you know that I’ve got one nearly twice as big as Hadrurus — an African variety? Oh, it’s a beauty, a real beauty—”

And there it was, the glance over the shoulder, the very same gesture he’d produced that day at the stall when he was just a child, and in the next moment we were off, side by side, and the house was behind us. He seemed to walk more deliberately than he had in the past, as if the years had weighed on him in some unfathomable way (or fathomable, absolutely fathomable, right down to the corrosive depths of his father’s heart), and I slowed my pace to accommodate him, worrying over the thought that he’d done some irreparable damage to muscle, ligament, cartilage, even to the nervous system itself. We passed the slaughterhouse where his mother’s first cousin, Refugio, sacrificed goats for the good of the family business, continued through the desiccated, lizard-haunted remains of what the city fathers had once intended as a park, and on up the long sloping hill that separates our village by class, income and, not least, education.