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

At one point — my recollection isn’t too clear here, I’m afraid, after the weed and the beer, not to mention the flamingest curry I’ve ever yet to this day run across — Dakgipa came and sat with us and we made a date to go hunting the following day after work. Dakgipa spent all his free time out in the bush, snaring squirrels, bandicoots, and the black-napped hare and the like, potting green pigeons in the trees and crow pheasants out in the fields, and he’d acted as a sort of guide for me, teaching me the habits of the local game and helping me tan the hides to ship back home so Jenny and I could stretch them decoratively over the walls of our condo-to-be. There was a quid pro quo, of course — Dak was a Counter-Strike addict and all he could talk about was the DSL capability he fervently hoped we were bringing him and the 10Base-T Ethernet network interface cards he expected we’d hand out to go with the new modems we were seeding the village with. But that was okay. That was cool. He gave me the binturong and the masked palm civet and I gave him the promise of high-speed Internet.

It grew dark. The mosquitoes settled in for their own feast, and even as the screeching day birds flew off to their roosts the night creatures took up the complaint, which sizzled through the quieter moments of the drummers’ repertoire like some sort of weird natural distortion, as if the gods of the jungle had their amps cranked too high. I was aware of Poonam beside me, Dak was sounding out Candi on the perennial question of Mac versus PC, and the drums had sunk down to the hypnotic pulse of water flowing in its eternal cycle — everything gone calm and mellow. After a long silence, Poonam turned to me. “Did you know the auntie of my host family was carried off by a bhut the other night?”

I didn’t know. Hadn’t heard. Poonam’s skin glowed in the light of the bonfire somebody had lit while I was dreaming the same dream as the drummers, and her eyes opened up to me so that I wanted to crawl inside them and forever forget Jenny and Des Moines and the Appleseed Condo Corp. Inc. “What’s a bhut ?” I asked.

“A forest spirit.”

“A what? Don’t tell me you actually—?” I caught myself and never finished the thought. I didn’t want to sound too harsh because we were just starting to have a real meeting of the minds and a meeting of the minds is — or can be, or ought to be — a prelude to a meeting of the flesh.

Her smile was softer, more serene than ever. “It was in the form of a leopard,” she said. “ Bhuts often take on the shape of that sneaking thief of the night. They come for adulterers, Randall, false-promisers, moneylenders, for the loose and easy. Some nights, they just take what they can get.”

I stared off into the fire, at the shapes that shifted there like souls come to life. “And the auntie — what did she do?”

Poonam gave an elaborate shrug. “They say she ate the flesh of the forest creatures without making sacrifice. But you’d have to believe, wouldn’t you, to put any credence in a primitive speculation like that?” The drums flowed, things crept unseen through the high grass. “Just think of it, Randall,” she said, rotating her hips so that she was facing me square on, “all these people through all these eons and when they go out to make water at night they might never come back, grandmother vanished on her way to the well, your childhood dog disappeared like smoke, your own children carried off. And you ask me if I believe ?”

Maybe it was the pot, maybe that was it, but suddenly I felt uneasy, as if the whole world were holding its breath and watching me and me alone. “But you said it yourself — it’s only a leopard.”

“Only?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. The fact was I’d never shot anything larger than a six-point buck on the edge of a soybean field; the biggest predators we had in Iowa were fox, bobcat, and coyote, nothing that could creep up on you without a sound and crush your skull in its jaws while simultaneously raking out your intestines with swift, knifing thrusts of its hind claws. That was a big “only.”

“Would you hunt such a thing, Randall? In the night? Would you?”

—

Candi was deep in conversation with Dak when Poonam and I excused ourselves to stroll back up the hill to my tent (“Yes,” Dak was saying, “but what sort of throughput speed can you offer?”). I’d felt so mellow and so — detached, I’d guess you’d call it, from Jenny that I found myself leaning into Poonam and putting my lips to her ear just as the drummers leapfrogged up the scale of intensity and the ground and the thatch and even the leaves of the bushes began to vibrate. It was hot. I was sweating from every pore. There was nothing in the world but drums. Drums were my essence, drums were the rain and the sunshine after a storm, they were the beginning and the end, the stars, the deeps — but I don’t want to get too carried away here. You get the idea: my lips, Poonam’s ear. “Would you—” I began, and I had to shout to hear myself, “I mean, would you want to come back to the tent for a nightcap maybe? With me?”

She smelled of palm oil — or maybe it was Nivea. She was shy, and so was I. “Yes,” she whispered, the sound all but lost in the tumult around us. But then she shrugged for emphasis and added, “Sure, why not?”

The night sustained us, the hill melted away. Her hand found mine in the dark. For a long while we sat side by side on my cot, mixing fresh-squeezed lime juice, confectioners’ sugar, and Tanqueray in my only glass and taking turns watching each other drink from it, and then she subsided against me, against my chest and the circulatory organ that was pounding away there — my heart, that is — and eventually I got to see what she looked like without the little knit blouse and the tight jeans and I fell away to the pulse of the drums and the image of a swift, spotted bhut stalking the night.

—

I woke with a jolt. It was dark still, the drums silent, the birds and monkeys nodding on their hidden perches, the chirring of the insects fading into the background like white noise. Somewhere, deep in my dream, someone had been screaming — and this was no ordinary scream, no mere wringing out of fear or excitement, but something darker, deeper, more hurtful and wicked — and now, awake, I heard it again. Poonam sat up beside me. “Jesus,” I said. “What was that?”

She didn’t say I told you so, didn’t say it was a leopard or a bhut or the creeping manifestation of the Christian Devil himself, because there was no time for that or anything else: the platform swayed under the weight of an animate being and I never thought to reach for my rifle or even my boxers. For an interminable time I sat there rigid in the dark, Poonam’s nails digging into my shoulder, neither of us breathing— Jenny, I was thinking, Jenny —until the flaps parted on the gray seep of dawn and Dak thrust his agitated face into the tent. “Randall,” he barked. “Randall — oh, shit! Shit! Have you got your gun, your rifle? Get your rifle. Bring it! Quick!” I could hear the birds now — first one started in and then they were all instantaneously competing to screech it down — and Poonam loosened her grip on my arm.

“What is it? What’s the problem?” I couldn’t really hear myself, but I have no doubt my voice was unsteady, because on some level — scratch that: on every level — I didn’t want to know and certainly didn’t want to have to go off into the bush after whatever it was that had made that unholy rupture in the fabric of the night.

Dak’s face just hung there, astonished, a caricature of impatience and exasperation, though I couldn’t see his eyes (for some reason — and this struck me as maybe the oddest thing about the whole situation — he was wearing Candi’s Matrix shades). “The big one,” he said. “The biggest bore you have.”