T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

I tried to stay away from Daggett’s— Give her a day or two, I told myself, don’t nag, don’t be a burden —but at quarter of nine I found myself at the bar, ordering a Jack-and-Coke from Chris. Chris gave me a look, and everything had changed since yesterday. “You sure?” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

“You look like you’ve had enough, buddy.”

I craned my neck to look for Daria, but all I saw were the regulars, hunched over their drinks. “Just pour,” I said.

The music was there like a persistent annoyance, dead music, ancient, appreciated by no one, not even the regulars. It droned on. Chris set down my drink and I lifted it to my lips. “Where’s Daria?” I asked.

“She got off early. Said she was tired. Slow night, you know?”

I felt a stab of disappointment, jealousy, hate. “You have a number for her?”

Chris gave me a wary look, because he knew something I didn’t. “You mean she didn’t give you her number?”

“No,” I said, “we never — well, she was at my house…”

“We can’t give out personal information.”

“To me? I said she was at my house. Last night. I need to talk to her, and it’s urgent — about the cat. She’s really into the cat, you know?”

“Sorry.”

I threw it back at him. “You’re sorry? Well, fuck you — I’m sorry too.”

“You know what, buddy—”

“Junior, the name’s Junior.”

He leaned into the bar, both arms propped before him, and in a very soft voice he said, “I think you better leave now.”

—

It had begun to rain, a soft patter in the leaves that grew steadier and harder as I walked home. Cars went by on the boulevard with the sound of paper tearing, and they dragged whole worlds behind them. The streetlights were dim. There was nobody out. When I came up the hill to my apartment I saw the Mustang standing there under the carport, and though I’d always been averse to drinking and driving — a lesson I’d learned from my father’s hapless example — I got behind the wheel and drove up to the jobsite with a crystalline clarity that would have scared me in any other state of mind. There was an aluminum ladder there, and I focused on that — the picture of it lying against the building — till I arrived and hauled it out of the mud and tied it to the roof of the car without a thought for the paint job or anything else.

When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with the overzealous knots I’d tied until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around the back of the apartment. I was drunk, yes, but cautious too — if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have gotten difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited there in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.

I didn’t want to go in the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat of that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark till I fell asleep.

In the morning — there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain — I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage — a den, a makeshift den — and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must be gone, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then — and I don’t know why — I pulled the door shut behind me.

(2003)

So we went in there with Meghalaya Cable, a subsidiary of Verizon (don’t ask, because I couldn’t begin to tell you: just think multinational, that’s all), and put in the grid so these people could have color TV and DSL hookups in their huts, and I brought a couple rifles with me. I like to hunt, all right? So crucify me. I grew up in Iowa, in Ottumwa, and it was a rare day when I didn’t bring something home for my mother, whether it was ringneck or rabbit or even a gopher or muskrat, which are not bad eating if you stew them up with tomatoes and onions, and plus you get your fur. I had to pay an excess baggage charge, which the company declined to pick up, but there was no way I was going to India without my guns. Especially since this leg of the project was in the West Garo Hills, where they still have the kind of jungle they had in Kipling’s day. Or at least remnants of it.

Anyway, it was my day off and I was lying up in my tent, slapping mosquitoes and leafing through a back issue of Guns & Ammo, the birds screeching in the trees, the heat delivering one knockout punch after another till I could barely hold my head up. I wouldn’t say I was bored — I was putting in a six-day workweek stringing wire to one ramshackle village after another, and just to lie there and feel the cot give under my bones was a luxury. Still, it felt as if the hands of my watch hadn’t moved in the last hour and as I drifted in and out of sleep the birds always seemed to be hitting the same note. I tried to relax, enjoy the moment and the magazine, but I was only waiting for the heat to let up so I could take my.22 and a jar of the local rice beer down the hill to the swamp and see what was stirring in the bushes.

I was studying the ads in the back of the magazine — a party in Wishbone, Montana, was offering a classic Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine with a Monte Carlo stock for sale or trade, a weapon I would have killed for — when I heard the sound of footsteps approaching on the path up from the village. Flip-flops. You could hear them a mile away, a slap, a shuffle, another slap, and then a quick burst: slap, slap, slap. There was a pause and I felt the bamboo platform rock ever so slightly.

The birds stopped screeching, all at once, as if the point of contention, whatever it was, had slipped their bird brains. A smell of meat roasting over the open fire came wafting up the hill on the first hint of an evening breeze. In the sudden hush I heard the frogs belching in the ditch behind me and the faintest thumping strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” from a radio in one of the other tents. “Randall? You in there?” came a voice just outside the front flap.

This was a female voice, and my hope (notwithstanding the fact that I was, and am, totally attached to Jenny, who I’m saving to buy a condo with in Des Moines) was that it was Poonam. Poonam was from Bombay, she wore tight jeans and little knit blouses that left her midriff bare, and she was doing her Ph.D. thesis on the Garos and their religious beliefs. She’d been waiting for me with a bottle of gin and a plate of curry when I got off work two days earlier, and I have to admit that the sound of her voice — she spoke very softly, so you had to strain to hear — put me in a sort of trance that wouldn’t seem to let up, and I’d begun to entertain thoughts about what she might look like without the jeans and blouse. All she could talk about was her research, of course, and that was fine by me, because with the gin and the curry and the sweet, soft music of her voice she could have been lecturing on the Bombay sewer system and I would have been rooted to the spot. (And what did the Garos believe in? Well, they called themselves Christians — they’d been converted under the British Raj — but in actuality they were animists, absolutely dead certain that spirits inhabited the trees, the earth, the creatures of the forest, and that those spirits were just about universally evil. That is, life was shit — rats in the granaries, elephants obliterating the fields, kraits and cobras killing the children the leopards hadn’t made off with, floods and droughts and diseases that didn’t even have names — and whoever was responsible for it had to be as malicious as a whole squad of devils.)