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

I really can’t say if it was the death of his daughter that broke him, but he marked the anniversary of the day in subsequent volumes and wrote what from its description seemed to be a symphony called “The Terri Variations,” though, as far as I know, no one ever heard it. Thirty years passed before he admitted the truth of what had happened that day on the Russian River — in the 2012 volume, which he had no idea of knowing would be his last. Or maybe he did. Maybe he had some intuition of what was coming, of the common cold his new girlfriend would give him on one of her conjugal visits, the cold he ignored till it turned to pneumonia and cost him his life in a dark neglected house.

There was no lifeguard on that beach. It wasn’t much of a beach even, just an irregular strip of sand spat up by the river during the winter rains, its configuration changing year to year so that one summer it would be a hundred yards across and the next fifty. Daytime temperatures reached into the nineties and sometimes higher, but the river remained cold, flowing swiftly, dark with its freight of sediment. Carey found the old woman and the old woman was drunk. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Little girl? She hadn’t seen any little girl. She cursed him and he cursed her back. Then he and Jim — the cuckold — chased up and down the shore, calling out till they had no breath left in them, while the women, Pamela and Francie, searched the parking lot and the street out front where the speed limit was posted at thirty-five but people tended to do fifty or more. Twenty minutes after Pamela first looked up and saw that their daughter was missing, they called the police.

What were they hoping? That Terri had been found wandering and been picked up by a good Samaritan, a real schoolteacher, an actual grandmother, someone with a stake in things, someone who cared, someone who would deliver her to the authorities — who was driving her to the police station even then. They didn’t want to think about abduction, didn’t want to think about the river. But they had to. And so Carey was up to his waist in the water, beating along the shore, ducking under obstructions, feeling with bare feet in the mud that blossomed in dark plumes to the surface and just as quickly dissolved in the current. He was wet through. Chilled. Exhausted. Even when the police and firemen arrived and they sent boats out onto the river with nets to drag and hooks to poke under obstructions, he kept at it, kept going through all the plummeting hours and all the horror and futility of it. And when they found her, still in her pink playsuit and with her limbs so white and bloodless they might have been bleached right on down to the bone, he pressed her to him though she was as cold as the river in its deepest and darkest hole.

—

Mary Ellen Stovall was right about the house. We didn’t bid on it, of course, Chrissie and I, because that was only the thought of the moment and we’re content where we are. In fact, I never even told Chrissie about the afternoon I’d gone over there and what had happened between her walking partner and me, which I’m not proud of, believe me, and when Mary Ellen stops by these days I always find that I seem to be busy elsewhere. I look at Chrissie and the way the light shines in her hair or how her smile opens up when I come in the door and I know that I love her and only her.

The bulldozers — there were two of them — came in and leveled everything on that lot, the car hauled off to the wrecking yard, the trees splintered, the walls of the house collapsing as if they’d been made of paperboard and all that was Carey Fortunoff’s life — his journals, his music, the things on the shelves and the room where they’d found him — lifted into an array of clanking trucks and carted off to the landfill so that only the bare scraped dirt remained. And the views, of course.

Why I kept that volume of his journal, the one I pulled off the shelf on a hushed Sunday morning nearly a year ago now, and why it’s still out there in the garage behind a barricade of National Geographic s no one will ever look at again, I can’t really say. Call it a memento, call it testimony. After all, you might ask, who was he, Carey Fortunoff, and why should anyone care? The answer is simple: he was you, he was me, he was any of us, and his life was important, all-important, the only life anybody ever lived, and when his eyes closed for the final time, the last half-eaten carton of noodles slipping from his hand, we all disappeared, all of us, and every creature alive too, and the earth and the light of the sun and all the grace of our collective being. That was Carey Fortunoff. That was who he was.

(2012)

Tara

She was born in captivity at an English zoo in 1978, one of a litter of three Bengal tiger cubs. Once she was weaned, she was tranquilized, lifted into a cage and flown across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean to Delhi, where she was put in the back of a pickup truck and driven north to the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, not far from the Nepalese border. There she came under the care of Billy Arjan Singh, hunter turned conservationist, who’d had success in rewilding leopards and now wanted to try his hand with tigers — and not out of any sort of vanity, as with the maharajahs and nouveaux riches who bred tigers for their own sport, but as a practical measure to reinvigorate the gene pool and save the species from extinction. The sad truth was that there were more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

He gave Tara the run of his house and yard, which was hemmed in by the serried vegetation of the park surrounding it, and he took her for excursions into the jungle in order to acclimate her. The first time the superintendent saw her ambling along at Billy’s side, he called out, “Why, she’s just like a dog.” And Billy, grinning, ran a hand through the soft fur at her throat. “Yes,” he called back, “but she’s just a big kitty, aren’t you, darling?” and then he bent to her and let her lick the side of his face with the hot wet rasp of her tongue. At first he fed her slabs of meat hacked from donated carcasses, then progressed to living game — rats, geese, francolin, civets — working up the food chain till she was stalking and running down the swamp deer and sambar that would constitute her natural prey. When she came into maturity — into heat — she left him to mate with one of the males he’d heard coughing and roaring in the night, but she allowed him to follow her to her den beneath the trunk of a downed sal tree and examine her first litter, four cubs, all apparently healthy.

What the tiger felt can only be imagined, but certainly to be removed from an enclosure in a cold alien place and released into the wild where her ancestors had roamed free through all the millennia before roads and zoos and even humans existed, must have been gratifying in some deep atavistic way. Billy’s feelings are easier to divine. He felt proud, felt vindicated, and for all the naysayers who claimed that captive-bred animals could never be reintegrated into the wild, here was Tara — and her cubs — to prove them wrong. Unfortunately, two problems arose that Billy hadn’t foreseen. The first was that the zoo in England had kept inaccurate stud records — shoddy, that is — so that genetic testing of her siblings would eventually show that Tara was not in fact a pure-bred Bengal but rather a hybrid whose father was of a different subspecies altogether — a Siberian. Billy’s critics rose up in condemnation: he’d polluted the gene pool, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and there was no going back because the animals were at large and the damage was done.

Still, this was nothing compared with the second problem. Within six months of Tara’s release, a resident of one of the local villages — a young woman, mother of four — was killed and partially eaten by a tiger that emerged in daylight and stalked down the center of the main street as if it had no fear of people whatever.