T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

He’ll come for me, she said to herself. I know he will.

For Aquiles, the next three weeks were purgatorial. Each day he awoke sweating in the silence of dawn and performed his stretching exercises on the Turkish carpet until the maid brought him his orange juice and the protein drink into which he mixed the contents of three raw eggs, two ounces of wheatgrass and a tablespoon of brewer’s yeast. Then he sat dazed in front of the high-definition plasma TV he’d bought his mother for her forty-fifth birthday, surrounded by his children (withdrawn from school for their own protection), and the unforgivably homely but capable girl from the provinces, Suspira Salvatoros, who’d been brought in to see after their welfare in the absence of his mother. In the corner, muttering darkly, sat his ahuela, the electric ghost of his mother’s features flitting across her face as she rattled her rosary and picked at the wart under her right eye till a thin line of serum ran down her cheek. The TV gave him nothing, not joy or even release, each show more stupefyingly banal than the last — how could people go about the business of winning prizes, putting on costumes and spouting dialogue, singing, dancing, stirring soft-shell crabs and cilantro in a fry pan for christ’s sake, when his mother, Marita Villalba, was in the hands of criminals who refused even to communicate let alone negotiate? Even baseball, even the playoffs, came to mean nothing to him.

And then, one bleak changeless morning, the sun like a firebrick tossed in the window and all Caracas up in arms over the abduction — Free Marita was scrawled in white soap on the windows of half the cars in town — he was cracking the eggs over his protein drink when Suspira Salvatoros knocked at the door. “Don Aquiles,”

she murmured, sidling into the room in her shy fumbling way, her eyes downcast, “something has come for you. A missive.” In her hand — bitten fingernails, a swell of fat — there was a single dirty white envelope, too thick for a letter and stained with a smear of something he couldn’t name. He felt as if his chest had been torn open, as if his still-beating heart had been snatched out of him and flung down on the carpet with the letter that dropped from his inef-fectual fingers. Suspira Salvatoros began to cry. And gradually, painfully, as if he were bending for the rosin bag in a nightmare defeat in which he could get no one out and the fans were jeering and the manager frozen in the dugout, he bent for the envelope and clutched it to him, hating the feel of it, the weight of it, the guilt and horror and accusation it carried.

Inside was a human finger, the little finger of the left hand, two inches of bone, cartilage and flesh gone the color of old meat, and at the tip of it, a manicured nail, painted red. For a long while he stood there, weak-kneed, the finger cold in the palm of his hand, and then he reverently folded it back into the envelope, secreted it in the inside pocket of his shirt, closest to his heart, and flung himself out the door. In the next moment he sprang into the car — the Hummer, and so what if it was the color of poppies and arterial blood, so much the worse for them, the desecrators, the criminals, the punks, and he was going to track them down if it was the last thing he did.

Within minutes he’d reached the police headquarters and pounded up the live flights of stairs, the ashen-faced bodyguard plodding along behind him. Without a word for anyone he burst into the Chief ’s office and laid the envelope on the desk before him.

The Chief had been arrested in the act of biting into a sweet cake while simultaneously blowing the steam off a cup of coffee, the morning newspaper propped up in front of him. He gave Aquiles a knowing look, set down the cake and extracted the finger from the envelope.

“I’ll pay,” Aquiles said. “Just let me pay. Please, God. She’s all I care about.”

The Chief held the finger out before him, studying it as if it were the most pedestrian thing in the world, a new sort of pen he’d been presented by the Boys’ Auxiliary, a stick of that dried-out bread the Italians serve with their antipasto. “You will not pay them,” he said without glancing up.

“I will.” Aquiles couldn’t help raising his voice. “The minute they call, I swear I’ll give them anything, I don’t care—”

Now the Chief raised his eyes. “Your presumption is that this is your mother’s finger?”

Aquiles just stared at him.

“She uses this shade of nail polish?”

“Yes, I–I assume …”

“Amateurs,” the Chief spat. “We’re onto them. We’ll have them, believe me. And you — assume nothing.”

The office seemed to quaver then, as if the walls were closing in.

Aquiles had begun to take deep breaths as he did on the mound when the situation was perilous, runner on first, no outs, a one-run ballgame. “My mother’s in pain,” he said.

“Your mother is not in pain. Not physical pain, at any rate.” The Chief had set the severed finger down on the napkin that cradled the sweet bun and brought the mug to his lips. He took a sip of the coffee and then set the mug down too. “This is not your mother’s finger,” he said finally. “This is not, in fact, even the finger of a female. Look at it. Look closely. This,” he pronounced, again lifting the mug to his lips, “is the finger of a man, a young man, maybe even a boy playing revolutionary. They like that, the boys. Dressing up, hiding out in the jungle. Calling themselves”—and here he let out his bitter laugh—“guerrillas.”

She was a week in the jungle, huddled over a filthy stewpot thick with chunks of carpincho, some with the hide still on it, her digestion in turmoil, the insects burrowing into her, her dress — the shift she’d been wearing when they came for her — so foul it was like a layer of grease applied to her body. Then they took her farther into the jungle, to a crude airstrip — the kind the narcotraficantes employ in their evil trade — and she was forced into a Cessna airplane with El Ojo, the boy with the pitiless eyes and an older man, the pilot, and they sailed high over the broken spine of the countryside and up into the mountains. At first she was afraid they were taking her across the border to Colombia to trade her to the FARC rebels there, but she could see by the sun that they were heading southeast, and that was small comfort because every minute they were in the air she was that many more miles from her home and rescue. Their destination — it appeared as a cluster of frame cottages with thatched roofs and the splotched yawning mouth of a dried-up swimming pool — gave up nothing, not a road or even a path, to connect it with the outside world.

The landing was rough, very rough, the little plane lurching and pitching like one of those infernal rides at the fair, and when she climbed down out of the cockpit she had to bend at the waist and release the contents of her stomach in the grass no one had thought to cut. The boy, her tormentor, the one they called Eduardo, gave her a shove from behind so that she fell to her knees in her own mess, so hurt and confused and angry she had to fight to keep from crying in front of him. And then there were other boys there, a host of them, teenagers in dirty camouflage fatigues with the machine rifles slung over their shoulders, their faces blooming as they greeted Eduardo and El Ojo and then narrowing in suspicion as they regarded her.

No one said a word to her. They unloaded the plane — beer, rum, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, sacks of rice and three cartons of noodles in a cup — and then ambled over to a crude table set up in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, talking and joking all the while. She heard the hiss of the first beer and then a chorus of hisses as one after another they popped the aluminum tabs and pressed the cans to their lips, and she stood and gazed up at the barren sky and then let her eyes drop to the palisade of the jungle that went on unbroken as far as she could see.