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

That was when the elephant gave a sudden lurch and swung around amidst the shattered bamboo and the tatters of thatch to face me head-on. Boom: it happened in an instant. There the thing was, fifty feet away — four quick elephantine strides — stinking and titanic, staggering from one foot to the other like one of the street people you see on the sidewalks of San Francisco or New York. It seemed perplexed, as if it couldn’t remember what it was doing there with all that wreckage scattered around it — and I had to credit the beer for that. Those fermenting tubs hold something like fifty gallons each, and that’s a lot of beer by anybody’s standards, even an elephant’s. The smallest ray of hope stirred in me — maybe, if I just stood rock still, the thing wouldn’t see me. Or couldn’t. Maybe it would just stagger into the jungle to sleep it off and I could save face by blowing a couple shots over its retreating butt.

But that wasn’t what happened.

The unreadable red-rimmed eyes seemed to seize on me and the thing threw back its head with one of those maniacal trumpeting blasts we all recognize, anybody who’s got a TV anyway, and then, quite plainly berserk, it came for me. I’d like to say I stood my ground, calmly pumping off round after round until the thing dropped massively at my feet, but that didn’t happen either. All at once my legs felt light again, as if they weren’t legs at all but things shaped out of air, and I dropped the gun and ran like I’d never run before in my life. And the crowd — all those irate Garo tribesmen, Dak and Candi and Poonam and whoever else was crazy enough to be out there watching this little slice of drama — they turned and ran too, but of course they had a good head start on me, and even if I’d just come off a first-place finish in the hundred meters at the Olympics, the elephant would have caught up to me in a heartbeat and transformed me into a section of roadway and all the money my parents had laid out on orthodontics and tuition and just plain food would have been for naught. I hadn’t gone ten paces before an errant fragment of thatch roof caught hold of my foot and down I went, expecting imminent transformation (or pancakeization, as Poonam later phrased it, and I didn’t think it was that funny, believe me).

The elephant had been trumpeting madly but suddenly the high notes shot right off the scale and I lifted my fragile head to see what I at first thought was some sort of giant black snake cavorting with the thing. I’ll tell you, the elephant was lively now, dancing right up off its toes as if it wanted to fly away. It took a moment to come together for me: that was no snake — that was the high-voltage cable and that thing at the other end of it was the snapped-off, bobbing remnant of a high-resin-compound utility pole. The dance was energetic, almost high-spirited, but it was over in an instant, and when the thing came down — the elephant, big as an eighteen-wheeler — the ground shook as if a whole city had collapsed.

There was dust everywhere. The cable whipped and sparked. I heard the crowd roar and reverse itself, a hundred feet pounding at the dirt, and then, in the midst of it all, there was that scream again, the one I’d heard in the night; it was like someone slipping a knife up under my ribcage and twisting it. My gaze leapt past the hulk of the elephant, past the ruin of the village and the pall of smoke, to the shadowy architecture of the jungle. And there it was, the spotted thing, crouching on all fours with its eyes fastened on me, raging yellow, raging, until it rose on two legs and vanished.

(2004)

Boston to Dedham

The road was dark, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn’t have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead. Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone. Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount’s hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea. Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive. The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed. She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself. She’d talked till her throat went dry as they’d left town in the declining sun and he’d done his best to keep up though he wasn’t naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they’d fallen silent. She resigned herself. Rode on. And just as she’d given up hope, a light appeared ahead.

At Dedham

Robert her cousin leaving her to await the Post at the cottage of the Reverend and Madam Belcher before turning round for Boston with a dozen admonitions on his lips — She should have gone by sea as there was no telling what surprises lay ahead on the road in that savage country and she was to travel solely with trusted companions and the Post, et cetera — she settled in by the fire with a cup of tea and explained her business to Madam Belcher in her cap and the Reverend with his pipe. Yes, she felt responsible. And yes, it was she who’d introduced her boarder, a young widow, to her kinsman, Caleb Trowbridge, only to have him die four months after the wedding and leave the poor woman twice widowed. There were matters of the estate to be settled in both New Haven and New York, and it was her intention to act in the widow’s behalf, being a widow herself and knowing how cruel such divisions of property can be.

An old dog lay on the rug. A tallow candle held a braided flame above it. There was a single ornament on the wall, a saying out of the Bible in needlepoint: He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth. After a pause, the Reverend’s wife asked if she would like another cup.

Sarah’s eyes rose from the fire to the black square of the window. “You’re very kind,” she said, “but no thank you.” She was concerned about the Post. Shouldn’t he have been here by now? Had she somehow managed to miss him? Because if she had, there was no sense in going on — she might just as well admit defeat and find a guide back to Boston in the morning. “But where can the Post be?” she asked, turning to the Reverend.

The Reverend was a big block of a man with a nose to support the weight of his fine-ground spectacles. He cleared his throat. “Might be he’s gone on to the Billingses, where he’s used to lodge.”

She listened to the hiss of the water trapped in a birch stick on the fire. Her whole body ached with the soreness of the saddle. “And how far would that be?”

“Twelve mile on.”

At Dedham Tavern

She sat in a corner in her riding clothes while the Reverend brought the hostess to her, the boards of the floor unswept, tobacco dragons putting their claws into the air and every man with a black cud of chew in his mouth. The woman came to her with her hair in a snarl and her hands patting at her hips, open-faced and wondering. The Reverend stood beside her with his nose and his spectacles, the crown of his hat poking into the timbers overhead. Could she be of assistance?