T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

The holy aroma of Elvira’s lasagna bathed the entire block as we turned the corner to the clinic. We’d been talking of inconsequential things, my practice, the parrot — yes, she was well, thank you — the gossip of the village, the weather, but nothing of his life, his travels, his feelings. It wasn’t till I’d got him in the back room under the black light, with a glass of iced and sweetened tea in his hand and a plate of dulces in his lap, that he began to open up to me. “Dámaso,”

I said at one point, the scorpions glowing like apparitions in the vestibules of their cages, “you don’t seem to be in very high spirits

— tell me, what’s the matter? Is it — your travels?”

In the dark, with the vinegary odor of the arachnids in our nostrils and the promise of Elvira’s cuisine wafting in the wings, he carefully set down his glass and brushed the crumbs from his lap before looking up at me. “Yes,” he said softly. And then with more emphasis, “Yes.”

I was silent a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my Hadrurus probing the boundaries of its cage. I waited for him to go on.

“I have no friends, Doctor, not a single one. Even my brothers and sisters look at me like I’m a stranger. And the boys all over the district, in the smallest towns, they try to imitate me.” His voice was strained, the tones of the adult, of his father, at war with the cracked breathy piping of a child. “They do what I do. And it hurts them.”

“You don’t have to do this anymore, Dámaso.” I felt the heat of my own emotions. “It’s wrong, deeply wrong, can’t you see that?”

He shrugged. “I have no choice. I owe it to my family. To my mother.”

“No,” I said, “you owe them nothing. Or not that. Not your own self, your own body, your heart—”

“She brought me into the world.”

Absurdly, I said, “So did I.”

There was a silence. After a moment, I went on, “You’ve been given a great gift, Dámaso, and I can help you with it — you can live here, with us, with Elvira and me, and never have to go out on the street and, and damage yourself again, because what your father is doing is evil, Dámaso, evil, and there’s no other word for it.”

He raised a wounded hand and let it fall again. “My family comes first,” he said. “They’ll always come first. I know my duty. But what they’ll never understand, what you don’t understand, is that I do hurt, I do feel it, I do.” And he lifted that same hand and tapped his breastbone, right over the place where his heart constricted and dilated and shot the blood through his veins. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where I hurt.”

He was dead a week later.

I didn’t even hear of it till he was already in the ground and Jerry Lemongello buckled in for the long flight down from Boise with the hope of collecting the DNA sample himself, too late now, Mercedes Funes inhaling smoke and tears and pinning one hopeless hand to her lower back as she bent over the grill while her husband wandered the streets in a dirty guayabera, as drunk as any derelict.

They say the boy was showing off for the urchins who followed him around as if he were some sort of divinity, the kind of boys who thrive on pain, who live to inflict and extract it as if it could be measured and held, as if it were precious, the kind of boys who carve hieroglyphs into their skin with razor blades and call it fashion. It was a three-story building. “Jump!” they shouted. “Sin Dolor! Sin Dolor!” He jumped, and he never felt a thing.

But what I wonder — and God, if He exists, have mercy on Francisco Funes and the mother too — is if he really knew what he was doing, if it was a matter not so much of bravado but of grief. We will never know. And we will never see another like him, though Jerry Lemongello tells me he’s heard of a boy in Pakistan with the same mutation, another boy who stands in the town square and mutilates himself to hear the gasps and the applause and gather up the money at his feet.

Within a year, Dámaso was forgotten. His family’s house had burned to ashes around the remains of a kerosene heater, the goats died and the brazier flared without him, and I closed up the clinic and moved permanently, with Elvira and her parrot, to our cottage by the sea. I pass my days now in the sunshine, tending our modest garden, walking the sugar-white beach to see what the tide has brought in. I no longer practice medicine, but of course I’m known here as El Estimado Doctor, and on occasion, in an emergency, a patient will show up on my doorstep. Just the other day a little girl of three or four came in, swaddled in her mother’s arms. She’d been playing in the tide pools down by the lava cliffs that rise up out of the sand like dense distant loaves and had stepped on a sea urchin.

One of the long black spikes the animal uses for defense had broken off under the child’s weight and embedded itself in the sole of her foot.

I soothed her as best I could, speaking softly to distract her, speaking nonsense really — all that matters in such circumstances is the intonation. I murmured. The sea murmured along the shore. As delicately as I could, I held her miniature heel in my hand, took hold of the slick black fragment with the grip of my forceps and pulled it cleanly from the flesh, and I have to tell you, that little girl shrieked till the very glass in the windows rattled, shrieked as if there were no other pain in the world.

The Sticker

I don’t have any children — I’m not even married, not anymore — but last month, though I was fried from my commute and looking forward to nothing more complicated than the bar, the TV and the microwave dinner, in that order, I made a point of attending the Thursday-evening meeting of the Smithstown School Board. On an empty stomach. Sans alcohol. Why? Because of Melanie Albert’s ninth-grade biology textbook — or, actually, the sticker affixed to the cover of it. This is the book with the close-up of the swallowtail butterfly against a field of pure environmental green, standard issue, used in ten thousand schools across the land, and it came to my attention when her father, Dave, and I were unwinding after work at the Granite Grill a week earlier.

The Granite is our local watering hole, and it doesn’t have much to recommend it, beyond the fact that it’s there. Its virtues reside mainly in what it doesn’t offer, I suppose — no waiters wrestling with their consciences, no chef striving to demonstrate his ability to fuse the Ethiopian and Korean culinary traditions, no music other than the hits of the eighties, piped in through a service that plumbs the deep cuts so that you get to hear The Clash doing “Wrong ’Em Boyo” and David Byrne’s “Swamp,” from his days with Talking Heads, instead of the same unvarying eternal crap you get on the radio. And it’s dimly lighted. Very dimly lighted. All you see, really, beyond the shifting colors of the TV, is the soft backlit glow of the bottles on display behind the bar dissolving into a hundred soothing glints of gold and copper. It’s relaxing — so relaxing I’ve found myself drifting off to dreamland right there in the grip of my barstool, one hand clenched round the stem of the glass, the other bracing up a chin as heavy as all the slag heaps of the earth combined. You could say it’s my second home. Or maybe my first.

We’d just settled into our stools, my right hand going instinctively to the bowl of artificial bar snacks while the Mets careened round the bases on the wide-screen TV and Rick, the bartender, stirred and strained my first Sidecar of the evening, when I became aware of Dave, off to my left, digging something out of his briefcase. There was a thump beside me and I turned my head.