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

I waited a moment, till he’d finished his poor reward and set the bottle down between his feet, and then I strolled casually past the house as if I just happened to be in the neighborhood. When I drew even with him — when I was sure he’d seen me — I stopped in my tracks and gave him an elaborate look of surprise, a double take, as it were. “Dámaso?” I exclaimed. “Can it really be you?”

I saw something light up in his eyes, but only the eyes — he seemed incapable of forming a smile with his lips. In the next moment he was out of the chair and striding across the yard to me, holding out his hand in greeting. “Doctor,” he said, and I saw the discoloration of the lips, the twin pinpoints of dried blood on either cheek amidst a battlefield of annealed scars, and I couldn’t have felt more shock and pity if he were indeed my own son.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

My mind was racing. All I could think of was how to get him out of there before Francisco Funes stepped through the door. “Would you like to come over to the clinic with me — for dinner? For old times’ sake? Elvira’s making an eggplant lasagna tonight, with a nice crisp salad and fried artichokes, and look”—I held up the bag of crickets and gave it a shake—“we can feed the scorpions. Did you know that I’ve got one nearly twice as big as Hadrurus —an African variety? Oh, it’s a beauty, a real beauty—”

And there it was, the glance over the shoulder, the very same gesture he’d produced that day at the stall when he was just a child, and in the next moment we were off, side by side, and the house was behind us. He seemed to walk more deliberately than he had in the past, as if the years had weighed on him in some unfathomable way (or fathomable, absolutely fathomable, right down to the corrosive depths of his father’s heart), and I slowed my pace to accommodate him, worrying over the thought that he’d done some irreparable damage to muscle, ligament, cartilage, even to the nervous system itself. We passed the slaughterhouse where his mother’s first cousin, Refugio, sacrificed goats for the good of the family business, continued through the desiccated, lizard-haunted remains of what the city fathers had once intended as a park, and on up the long sloping hill that separates our village by class, income and, not least, education.

The holy aroma of Elvira’s lasagna bathed the entire block as we turned the corner to the clinic. We’d been talking of inconsequential things, my practice, the parrot — yes, she was well, thank you — the gossip of the village, the weather, but nothing of his life, his travels, his feelings. It wasn’t till I’d got him in the back room under the black light, with a glass of iced and sweetened tea in his hand and a plate of dulces in his lap, that he began to open up to me. “Dámaso,” I said at one point, the scorpions glowing like apparitions in the vestibules of their cages, “you don’t seem to be in very high spirits — tell me, what’s the matter? Is it — your travels?”

In the dark, with the vinegary odor of the arachnids in our nostrils and the promise of Elvira’s cuisine wafting in the wings, he carefully set down his glass and brushed the crumbs from his lap before looking up at me. “Yes,” he said softly. And then with more emphasis, “Yes.”

I was silent a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my Hadrurus probing the boundaries of its cage. I waited for him to go on.

“I have no friends, Doctor, not a single one. Even my brothers and sisters look at me like I’m a stranger. And the boys all over the district, in the smallest towns, they try to imitate me.” His voice was strained, the tones of the adult, of his father, at war with the cracked breathy piping of a child. “They do what I do. And it hurts them.”

“You don’t have to do this anymore, Dámaso.” I felt the heat of my own emotions. “It’s wrong, deeply wrong, can’t you see that?”

He shrugged. “I have no choice. I owe it to my family. To my mother.”

“No,” I said, “you owe them nothing. Or not that. Not your own self, your own body, your heart—”

“She brought me into the world.”

Absurdly, I said, “So did I.”

There was a silence. After a moment, I went on, “You’ve been given a great gift, Dámaso, and I can help you with it — you can live here, with us, with Elvira and me, and never have to go out on the street and, and damage yourself again, because what your father is doing is evil, Dámaso, evil, and there’s no other word for it.”

He raised a wounded hand and let it fall again. “My family comes first,” he said. “They’ll always come first. I know my duty. But what they’ll never understand, what you don’t understand, is that I do hurt, I do feel it, I do. ” And he lifted that same hand and tapped his breastbone, right over the place where his heart constricted and dilated and shot the blood through his veins. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where I hurt.”

—

He was dead a week later.

I didn’t even hear of it till he was already in the ground and Jerry Lemongello buckled in for the long flight down from Boise with the hope of collecting the DNA sample himself, too late now, Mercedes Funes inhaling smoke and tears and pinning one hopeless hand to her lower back as she bent over the grill while her husband wandered the streets in a dirty guayabera, as drunk as any derelict. They say the boy was showing off for the urchins who followed him around as if he were some sort of divinity, the kind of boys who thrive on pain, who live to inflict and extract it as if it could be measured and held, as if it were precious, the kind of boys who carve hieroglyphs into their skin with razor blades and call it fashion. It was a three-story building. “Jump!” they shouted. “Sin Dolor! Sin Dolor!” He jumped, and he never felt a thing.

But what I wonder — and God, if He exists, have mercy on Francisco Funes and the mother too — is if he really knew what he was doing, if it was a matter not so much of bravado but of grief. We will never know. And we will never see another like him, though Jerry Lemongello tells me he’s heard of a boy in Pakistan with the same mutation, another boy who stands in the town square and mutilates himself to hear the gasps and the applause and gather up the money at his feet.

Within a year, Dámaso was forgotten. His family’s house had burned to ashes around the remains of a kerosene heater, the goats died and the brazier flared without him, and I closed up the clinic and moved permanently, with Elvira and her parrot, to our cottage by the sea. I pass my days now in the sunshine, tending our modest garden, walking the sugar-white beach to see what the tide has brought in. I no longer practice medicine, but of course I’m known here as El Estimado Doctor, and on occasion, in an emergency, a patient will show up on my doorstep. Just the other day a little girl of three or four came in, swaddled in her mother’s arms. She’d been playing in the tide pools down by the lava cliffs that rise up out of the sand like dense distant loaves and had stepped on a sea urchin. One of the long black spikes the animal uses for defense had broken off under the child’s weight and embedded itself in the sole of her foot.

I soothed her as best I could, speaking softly to distract her, speaking nonsense really — all that matters in such circumstances is the intonation. I murmured. The sea murmured along the shore. As delicately as I could, I held her miniature heel in my hand, took hold of the slick black fragment with the grip of my forceps and pulled it cleanly from the flesh, and I have to tell you, that little girl shrieked till the very glass in the windows rattled, shrieked as if there were no other pain in the world.