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

“For what? Why? What’s the deal?” Though our entire exchange could have been compacted into the space of maybe ten seconds, I was stalling, no doubt about it.

His response, delivered through clenched teeth, completely threw me. I don’t know what I’d expected — demons, man-eaters, Bangladeshi terrorists — but probably the last thing was elephants. “Elephants?” I repeated stupidly. To tell you the truth, I’d pretty much forgotten they even had elephants out there in the bush — sure, people still used them to haul things, like telephone poles, for instance, but those elephants were as tame as lapdogs and no more noticeable or threatening than a big gray stucco wall.

I still hadn’t moved. Poonam shielded herself from Dak — as if, in this moment of fomenting crisis, he would have been interested in the shape of her breasts — and before I’d even reached for my shorts she had the knit blouse over her head and was smoothing it down under her ribcage.

What had happened, apparently, was that the wild elephants had come thundering out of the jungle at first light to ravage the village and raid the crops. All I could think of were those old Tarzan movies — I mean, really: elephants ? “You’re joking, right, Dak?” I said, reaching for my clothes. “It’s like April Fool’s, right — part of the whole Wangala thing? Tell me you’re joking.”

I’d never heard Dak raise his voice before — he was so together, so calm and focused, he was almost holy — but he raised it now. “Will you fucking wake up to what I’m telling you, Randall — they’re wrecking the place, going for the granary, trampling the fields. Worse — they’re drunk!”

“Drunk?”

His face collapsed, his shoulders sank. “They got the rice beer. All of it.”

—

And so, that was how I found myself stalking the streets of the village ten minutes later, the very sweaty stock of a very inadequate rifle in my hand. The place was unrecognizable. Trees had been uprooted, the huts crushed, the carcasses of pigs, chickens, and goats scattered like trash. Smoke rose from the ruins where early-morning cook-fires had gone out of control and begun to swallow up the splinters of the huts, even as people ran around frantically with leaking buckets of water. There was one man dead in the street and I’d never seen a dead human being before, both sets of my grandparents having opted for cremation to spare us the mortuary and the open casket and the waxen effigies propped within. He was lying on his face in the dirt, the skin stripped from his back like the husk of a banana, his head radically compressed. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I recognized him as one of the drummers from the previous night. I felt something rise in my throat, a lump of it burning there.

That was when the villagers caught sight of me, caught sight of the rifle. Within minutes I’d attracted a vengeful, hysterical crowd, everybody jabbering and gesticulating and singing their own little song of woe, and me at the head of the mob, utterly clueless. The rifle in my hands — a 7mm Remington — was no elephant gun. Far from it. It packed some stopping power, sure, and I’d brought it along in the unlikely event I could get a shot at something big, a gaur or maybe even a leopard or (crucify me) a tiger. Back in Ottumwa I suppose I’d entertained a fantasy about coming down some sun-spangled path and seeing a big flat-headed Bengal tiger making off with somebody’s dog and dropping him with a single, perfect heart shot and then paying a bunch of worshipful coolies or natives or whoever they might be to skin it out so Jenny and I could hang it on the wall and I could have a story to tell over the course of the next thousand backyard barbecues. But that was the fantasy and this was the reality. To stop an elephant — even to put a scare into one — you needed a lot more firepower than I had. And experience — experience wouldn’t hurt either.

The noise level — people squabbling and shouting, the eternal birds, dogs howling — was getting to me. How could anybody expect me to stalk an animal with this circus at my back? I looked around for Dak, hoping he could do something to distract the mob so that I could have some peace to prop myself up and stop the heaviness in my legs from climbing up over my belt and paralyzing me. I’d never been more afraid in my life, and I didn’t know what was worse — having to shoot something the size of a house without getting trampled or looking like a fool, coward and wimp in the face of all these people. Like it or not, I was the one with the gun, the white man, the pukka sahib; I was the torchbearer of Western superiority, the one with everything to prove and everything to lose. How had I gotten myself into this? Just because I liked to hunt? Because I’d potted a bandicoot or two and the entire village knew it? And this wasn’t just one elephant, which would have been bad enough, but a whole herd — and they were drunk, and who knew what that would do to their judgment?

The crowd pushed me forward like the surge of the tide and I looked in vain for Dak — for a friendly face, for anybody — until finally I spotted him at the rear of the press, with Candi and Poonam at his side, all three of them looking as if they’d just vomited up breakfast. I gave them a sick wave — there was nothing else I could do — and came round a corner to see two other corpses laid out in the street as if they were sleeping on very thin mattresses. And then, suddenly, the crowd fell silent.

There before me was an elephant. Or the truck-high back end of one. It was standing in the shell of a hut, its head bent forward as it sucked rice beer up its trunk from an open cask that somehow, crazily, had remained upright through all the preceding chaos. I remember thinking what an amazing animal this was — a kind of animate bulldozer, and it lived right out there in the jungle, invisible to everybody but the birds, as stealthy as a rat — and wondered what we’d do if we had things like this back home, ready to burst out of the river bottom and lay waste to the cornfields on their way to Kenny’s Bar and Grill to tap half a dozen kegs at a time. The thought was short-lived. Because the thing had lifted its head and craned its neck — if it even had a neck — to look back over its shoulder and fan its ears, which were like big tattered flags of flesh. Reflexively I looked over my shoulder and discovered that I was alone — the villagers had cleared off to a distance of five hundred feet, as if the tide had suddenly receded. How did I feel about that? For one thing, it made my legs go even heavier — they were pillars, they were made of concrete, marble, lead, and I couldn’t have run if I’d wanted to. For another, I began a grisly calculation — as long as the crowd had been with me, the elephant would have had a degree of choice as to just who it wanted to obliterate. Now that choice had been drastically reduced.

Very slowly — infinitely slowly, millimeter by millimeter — I began to move to my right, the rifle at my shoulder, the cartridge in the chamber, my finger frozen at the trigger. I needed to get broadside of the thing, which had gone back to drinking beer now, pausing to snort or to tear up a patch of long grass and beat it against its knees in a nice calm undrunken grandmotherly kind of way that lulled me for an instant. But really, I didn’t have a clue. I remembered the Orwell essay, which Guns & Ammo reprinted every couple of years by way of thrilling the reading public with the fantasy of bringing down the ultimate trophy animal, and how Orwell said he’d thought the thing’s brain was just back of the eyes. My right arm felt as if it was in a cast. My trigger finger swelled up to the size of a baseball bat. I couldn’t seem to breathe.