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

Then her mother came for them and they were outside in the damp air, the fog misting around them and the smell of the animals sharp in her nostrils. There was a hooting in the distance, one of the monkeys, the ones with voices like fire alarms. It just kept going, this monkey, and when you thought it was going to stop, when it slowed down and the hoots were softer and spaced further apart, it was only gathering breath for the next blast. That was the thing about having the wedding at the zoo — it was weird, but in a good way, because you never knew what was going to happen. Unlike in a church. Here was this thing out of a jungle someplace that didn’t care in the slightest about weddings and caterers and the volume of the string quartet her mother had hired to play the wedding march as they came down the walk and under the roof of the open-air pavilion.

She was watching her feet, afraid to trip or stumble or do something wrong, all the adults standing now and looking back over their shoulders to get a glimpse of the bride, while the string quartet strained to drown out the monkey. All the men were in tuxedos. Some of the women wore hats. There were flowers everywhere. And then, just as she got to where the minister was waiting along with Dylan and the best man, she saw Dylan’s little brother Jason, who was thirteen and a secret smoker of clove cigarettes, Jason, dressed in a suit and tie and giving her his starving zombie look to make her laugh. But she didn’t laugh, though the Red Bull was pulsing through her. She just swept up the aisle the way she’d practiced it at the rehearsal, smiling at everybody as if she were the one getting married — and maybe someday she would be.

Afterward, when people were standing in line for food and drinks and the DJ was setting up his equipment, Jason came up to her with a plate of pot stickers and offered her one. “Did you hear that monkey?” he said. “I thought he was going to bust a gut.”

She hadn’t noticed till that moment that the sound was gone, long gone, replaced now by the prandial buzz of the adults poised over their plates and wine glasses. “It was so funny,” she said, using her fingers to pluck a pot sticker from the edge of the plate.

“If any monkey knows any reason why these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

She laughed at the very moment she bit into the pot sticker, which caused a dribble of grease to run down the front of her dress. She glanced up guiltily to see if her mother was watching, but her mother was on the far side of the pavilion with Aunt Katie, waving a glass of yellowish wine as if it were a baton.

“Hey,” Jason said, his smile narrowing till it was gone, “you want to see something?”

“What?”

He shot his eyes at the adults bent over their canapés and drinks, then came back to her. He lifted his chin to point behind her, down the steps of the pavilion where the walk wound its way into the depths of the zoo. “Out there, I mean?”

She didn’t know what to say. The zoo was closed, yellow crime-scene tape— Do Not Cross —stretched across the path, and her mother had strictly forbidden her even to think for a single second about leaving the pavilion. And her mother meant it. The whole last week she’d been in a fury, constantly on the phone with her lawyer and the zoo people and the mayor’s office and anybody else she could harangue because they were threatening to cancel the permit for the wedding. Because of what had happened on Christmas. The accident. The attack. It was on the news, on Facebook, Twitter, everywhere — the police were investigating and the zoo was closed until further notice. But her mother had prevailed. Her mother had connections. Her mother always got what she wanted — and they’d reserved the pavilion a whole year in advance, because Megan and Dylan had met here at the zoo as interns on summer vacation from college and it was the only place in the world they would even consider exchanging vows. They’d hired the caterers, the DJ, sent out invitations. There was only one answer her mother would accept. Megan and Dylan got their pavilion, but the rest of the zoo was off-limits. To everybody. Period.

She just looked at him. He knew the situation as well as she did.

“I found something,” he said. “On the walk there? It’s like two hundred feet away.”

“What?” she said.

“Blood.”

Tara

Typically, there had been one or two tiger attacks in the reserve each year, usually during the monsoon season when people went into the park to collect grasses for their animals. Over the years, going all the way back to the last century, long before the park existed — and long before that too, as long as people and wild animals had been thrust together in the same dwindling patchwork of bush and farmer’s fields — the region had had its share of man-eaters, but these had been hunted down and eliminated. Now, after the second and third victims were found lying in a tangle of disarticulated limbs along a path that lay just a mile from the site of the first attack, Billy Arjan Singh began to have second thoughts. Publicly he continued to maintain that the attacks could have come from any of the park’s tigers, especially those that had been injured or were too old and feeble to hunt their customary prey — and Tara, demonstrably, was as young and vigorous as any animal out there — but privately he began to admit the possibility that his experiment had gone terribly wrong.

There came a respite. Several months went by without report of any new victims, though one man — a woodcutter — went missing and was never heard from again. Billy dismissed the rumor. People went missing all the time — they ran off, changed their names, hitchhiked to Delhi, flew to America, died of a pain up under the ribcage and lay face-down in some secret place till the jackals, carrion birds and worms had done with them. All was quiet. He began the process of obtaining permits to bring another animal into the country, this one from the zoo at Frankfurt.

Then it all went to hell. A woman — a grandmother barely five feet tall — was snatched while hanging laundry out to dry and half the village witnessed it — and before the week was out, a bicyclist was taken. In rapid succession, all along the perimeter of the park, six more people were killed, always in daylight and always by a tiger that seemed to come out of nowhere. Outrage mounted. The newspapers were savage. Finally, Billy gave in to the pressure and mounted a hunt to put an end to the killings — and, he hoped, prove that it was some other animal and not Tara that was responsible.

In all, before the tiger— a tiger — was shot, twenty-four people lost their lives. Billy was there for the kill, along with two of the park’s rangers, though when the tiger came to the bait — a goat bleating out its discomfort where it had wound itself around the stake to which it was tethered — his hand fluttered on the trigger. They followed the blood spoor to a copse and stood at a safe distance as the tiger’s anguished breathing subsided, then Billy moved in alone to deliver the coup de grace. The animal proved to be young — and female — but it had no distinguishing marks and to the last Billy insisted it wasn’t Tara. Whether it was or not, no one will ever know, because he chose to bury the carcass there deep in the jungle, where the mad growth of vegetation would obliterate the evidence in a week’s time. In any case, the attacks ceased and life in the villages went back to normal.

Vijay

He always had specific things he wanted to see — the African savanna, where zebra, kudu, ostrich and giraffe wandered back and forth as if there were no walls or fences and you could watch them grazing, watch them pissing and shitting and sometimes frisking around, and the koalas, he loved the koalas, and the bears and the chimps, the little things that were different about them each time he visited — but Vik and Manny didn’t care about any of that. For them the zoo was just a place where they could watch girls, get stoned and kick back without anybody coming down on them. He didn’t mind. He felt that way himself sometimes — today, for instance. Today especially. It was Christmas. They were out of school. He’d worked hard all term and now it was time to let loose.