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

“Hey,” he said, when Manny answered.

“Hey.”

“How you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Hungover. How about you?”

He shrugged, no big deal, though Manny wasn’t there to see it. “Maybe a little. But I just got to get out of here today, what with my dad watching soccer and moms doing whatever, cooking, the crossword puzzles, I don’t know. I was thinking — you cool with it, you done with the family stuff?”

“I don’t know, sure. What do you got in mind?”

“There’s nobody going to be at the zoo today, it’ll be like deserted, so I thought, once I tear Vik away from his sexy dreams, maybe we just go over there and hang out, you know?”

No response. But he could hear Manny breathing on the other side.

“We can like grab a burger on the way. And Vik still has that Stoli from last night — so even if the stores are closed… And weed — weed, of course. What do you say?”

Tatiana

She was a Siberian, four and a half years old, with the wide head, heavy frame and pale fur that distinguished her subspecies of Panthera tigris. Like Tara, she’d been born in captivity — at the Denver Zoo — and then transferred to San Francisco for breeding purposes two years earlier. That first day, when she came out of sedation, she found herself in the cage she’d been forced into just before dawn in the thin dry air of the Rocky Mountains, the only air she’d ever known, but there was something different about the cage now and it took her a moment to apprehend it: the front panel stood open. The smell must have come to her then, dank and lingering, the reek of the sea that was less than a quarter mile away, and then all the other smells she would have recognized from that morning and the morning before and all the mornings of her life, animal smells, the scent of urine and feces and the riveting anal discharge big cats use to mark their territory.

She didn’t emerge right away, not that first day. She seemed to prefer the cage, with its impermeable top and the fading odors of her home, safe there from whatever loomed over her, above the high concrete walls of the outdoor enclosure in which the cage had been placed. Sounds came to her: the harsh broken cries of parrots and macaws, the noise of traffic out on the street and the engines of planes that were like insects droning across the sky, the trumpeting of an elephant, a snarl, a roar, and over it all the screeching of monkeys, monkeys and apes.

Vijay

He hadn’t confessed it to anyone, not even his brother, because he wasn’t a dork and didn’t want to be taken for one, like all the other Indians and Chinese he’d been lumped together with in school since kindergarten, but his secret love, his true love, wasn’t for the engineering degree his parents kept pushing him toward, but for animals. He wanted to be a zoologist — or better yet, a field biologist, studying animals in a state of nature, just like on the TV shows. Both Vik and Manny would say things like, Why the zoo all the time, man, what’s the deal? You in love with a gorilla, or what? And he would shrug and say, I don’t know, you got a better suggestion? And they didn’t. Because the zoo was five blocks from the house and he and Vik had been going there since they were kids, just to get out from under the critical eye of their mother, who would have objected if they were going to just hang out on the street like hooligans ( Hooligans and I don’t know, gangbangers, isn’t that what they call them?) but found the idea of the zoo vaguely educational. It was a place where they weren’t going to get in trouble anyway — or that was the way she saw it.

By the time they got to the burger place on Sloat across from the zoo, it was already three in the afternoon and it just seemed natural to doctor their Cokes with a hit or two from the bottle, especially since it was a holiday and it was a hair-of-the-dog kind of thing, though Manny said it was disgusting to waste good vodka like that so he ordered an orange drink to go with his. It was a gray day, heavy with mist rolling in off the ocean. The burger place was deserted, the streets were empty. Christmas. They stared out the window on nothing, chewing.

“What time you got to be home?” he asked Manny. “It’s like a special dinner today, right? With like your aunts and uncles and all that?”

Manny ducked his head, took a pull of his orange and vodka. He was in his board shorts and a black hoodie and he was wearing a brand-new Warriors cap, a Christmas present from his sister. “I don’t know,” he said. “Six, six-thirty. And yeah, I got to be there.”

Vik hadn’t said much to this point, his eyes raw and red, his cheeks puffed out as if the burger was repeating on him. “Hey, if we’re going to go,” he said now, “we ought to go because we can’t smoke here and I think I’ve had about enough of sitting and staring out the window on nothing — anybody comes by and sees us here they’re going to think we’re losers, right? Primo losers.”

So they got up and shuffled out the door, Vijay secretly pleased it was his brother who’d got them motivated instead of him because he wouldn’t want to seem too eager, but the fact was the zoo would be closing at dusk and they didn’t really have all that much time. Out on the sidewalk, Vik lit a joint and they passed it hand to hand as they crossed the street to the zoo’s entrance. “So Christmas,” Vik was saying to Manny. “Do you have a tree and all that?”

Manny had his head down as if he had to watch his feet to be sure where they were going. He seemed rocked already. “Yeah,” he murmured.

“That cool?”

“Yeah. We put lights on it, ornaments, colored balls.”

“Spangles? Those silver things, I mean?”

“Tinsel, yeah.”

They were almost at the ticket kiosk now, Vijay digging into his wallet for the family pass their mother renewed each year. All he had to do was flash it at whoever was behind the window, usually a bony red-haired girl with no tits and an onyx stud like a mole under her lip, and she just waved them in — Manny, with his dark skin and black buzz cut, passing for just another brother in the Singh family.

Vik said, “That’s a German thing, you know.”

“What, tinsel?”

“The tree. ‘O Tannenbaum.’ Didn’t you guys have to sing that in elementary school?” Then he was laughing, one of those warm-up laughs that promised more but really wasn’t out of control yet. “I mean, it’s not Mexican or even American, but German. Can you picture it, all those Nazis handing out these scrawny little trees to cheer up the Jews at what, Auschwitz?”

They were there now, at the window, and Vijay was flashing the family membership card, and though the girl wasn’t there— Christmas —but some fat old man instead, it wasn’t a problem. He barely glanced up from his iPhone, the old man — fat, fat as a Butterball turkey stuffed with sausage and chestnuts and cranberries and whatever — fixing them for half a second with his beady brown dog’s eyes, and then he waved them in.

Siobhan

Of course, the wedding didn’t start right away (and the groom couldn’t see the bride because that was bad luck), so she had to go into this little back room that looked like somebody’s office with her sister and her friends, everybody putting on makeup and texting like mad and passing around a silver flask with Sambuca in it. Nobody offered her any, which she wouldn’t have taken anyway, even out of curiosity, because liquor was for adults and she wasn’t an adult and was in no particular hurry to be one. She did have a Red Bull though, and it made her feel as if she were in the final lap of a race at school and beating everybody by a mile.