T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: Best Life: “Bulletproof ”; Harper’s:

“Question 62” and “Admiral”; The Kenyon Review: “Hands On”; McSweeney’s: “Wild Child”; The New Yorker: “La Conchita,” “Sin Dolor,” “The Lie,” “Thirteen Hundred Rats” and “Ash Monday”; The Paris Review: “Balto”; Playboy: “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado” and “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”; and A Public Space: “Anacapa.”

“Balto” also appeared in The Best American Stories, 2007, edited by Stephen King (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and “Admiral”

in The Best American Stories, 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). The author would also like to acknowledge Harlan Lane’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron and Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment as sources of certain factual details in “Wild Child.”

There were two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones. That was what her father’s attorney was telling her, and she was listening, doing her best, her face a small glazed crescent of light where the sun glanced off the yellow kitchen wall to illuminate her, but it was hard. Hard because it was a weekday, after school, and this was her free time, her chance to breeze into the 7-Eleven or Instant Message her friends before dinner and homework closed the day down. Hard too because her father was there, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee. His face was soft, the lines at the corners of his eyes nearly erased in the gentle spill of light — his crow’s-feet, and how she loved that word, as if the bird’s scaly claws had taken hold there like something out of a horror story, Edgar Allan Poe, the Raven, Nevermore, but wasn’t a raven different from a crow and why not call them raven’s-feet? Or hawk’s-feet? People could have a hawk’s nose — they always did in stories — but they had crow’s-feet, and that didn’t make any sense at all.

“Angelle,” the attorney said — Mr. Apodaca — and the sound of her own name startled her, “are you listening to me?”

She nodded her head. And because that didn’t seem enough, she spoke up too. “Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange in her ears, as if somebody else were speaking for her.

“Good,” he said, “good,” leaning into the table so that his big moist dog’s eyes settled on her with a baleful look. “Because this is very important, I don’t have to stress that—”

He waited for her to nod again before going on.

“There are two kinds of truths,” he repeated, “just like lies. There are bad lies, we all know that, lies meant to cheat and deceive, and then there are white lies, little fibs that don’t really hurt anybody”—he blew out a soft puff of air, as if he were just stepping into a hot tub—“and might actually do good. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She held herself perfectly still. Of course she understood — he was treating her like a nine-year-old, like her sister, and she was twelve, almost thirteen, and this was an act of rebellion, to hold herself there, not answering, not nodding, not even blinking her eyes.

“Like in this case,” he went on, “your father’s case, I mean.

You’ve seen TV, the movies. The judge asks you for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and you’ll swear to it, everybody does — your father, me, anybody before the court.” He had a mug too, one she recognized from her mother’s college days — B.U., it said in thick red letters, Boston University — but there was coffee in his, or there had been. Now he just pushed it around the table as if it were a chess piece and he couldn’t decide where to play it. “All I want you to remember — and your father wants this too, or no, he needs it, needs you to pay attention — is that there are good truths and bad truths, that’s all. And your memory only serves to a point; I mean, who’s to say what really happened, because everybody has their own version, that woman jogger, the boy on the bike — and the D.A., the district attorney, he’s the one who might ask you what happened that day, just him and me, that’s all. Don’t you worry about anything.”

But she was worried, because Mr. Apodaca was there in the first place, with his perfect suit and perfect tie and his doggy eyes, and because her father had been handcuffed along the side of the road and taken to jail and the car had been impounded, which meant nobody could use it, not her father or her mother when she came back from France or Dolores the maid or Allie the au pair. There was all that, but there was something else too, something in her father’s look and the attorney’s sugary tones that hardened her: they were talking down to her. Talking down to her as if she had no more sense than her little sister. And she did. She did.

That day, the day of the incident — or accident, he’d have to call it an accident now — he’d met Marcy for lunch at a restaurant down by the marina where you could sit outside and watch the way the sun struck the masts of the ships as they rocked on the tide and the light shattered and regrouped and shattered again. It was one of his favorite spots in town — one of his favorite spots, period. No matter how overburdened he felt, no matter how life beat him down and every task and deadline seemed to swell up out of all proportion so that twenty people couldn’t have dealt with it all — a team, an army — this place, this table in the far corner of the deck overlooking the jungle of masts, the bleached wooden catwalks, the glowing arc of the harbor and the mountains that framed it, always had a calming effect on him. That and the just-this-side-of-too-cold local chardonnay they served by the glass. He was working on his second when Marcy came up the stairs, swaying over her heels like a model on the runway, and glided down the length of the deck to join him.

She gave him an uncomplicated smile, a smile that lit her eyes and acknowledged everything — the day, the locale, the sun and the breeze and the clean pounded smell of the ocean and him perched there in the middle of it all — and bent to kiss him before easing herself into the chair beside him. “That looks nice,” she said, referring to the wine dense as struck gold in the glass before him, and held up a finger for the waiter.

And what did they talk about? Little things. Her work, the pair of shoes she’d bought and returned and then bought all over again, the movie they’d seen two nights ago — the last time they’d been together — and how she still couldn’t believe he liked that ending.

“It’s not that it was cheesy,” she said, and here was her wine and should they get a bottle, yeah, sure, a bottle, why not? “and it was, but just that I didn’t believe it.”

“Didn’t believe what — that the husband would take her back?”

“No,” she said. “Or yes. It’s idiotic. But what do you expect from a French movie? They always have these slinky-looking heroines in their thirties—”

“Or forties.”

“—with great legs and mascara out of, I don’t know, a KISS

revival, and then even though they’re married to the greatest guy in the world they feel unfulfilled and they go out and fuck the whole village, starting with the butcher.”

“Juliette Binoche,” he said. He was feeling the wine. Feeling good.