T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Night

Andrea and the pilot choose to sleep in the main cabin for the first time.

We keep a bonfire burning through the darkness.

We share sentry duty.

The sounds of the jungle are knives punched through our chests.

Morning

I wake in a sweat. Everything still. Andrea, all leg, shoulder, navel and cleavage, is snoring, her breath grating like bark stripped from a tree. Beside her, the pilot: captain’s cap pulled over his face, gun tucked in his belt. The professor, who had the last watch, is curled in his chair asleep. Outside, the fire has burned to fine white ash and a coatimundi steals across the clearing. Something is wrong — I feel it like a bad dream that refuses to end. Then I glance over at the mime. He looks exactly like John F. Kennedy lying in state. Dead.

There is no time for ceremony. No time in fact for burial. The pilot, sour with sleep, drops a blanket over the frozen white face and leads us cautiously out of the plane, and into the bush. We shoulder our clubs, the white bundles. Our life jackets glow in the seeping gloom. The pilot, Andrea, the professor, me. A team. Pass the baton and run, I think, and chuckle to myself. My expectation of survival is low, but I follow anyway, and watch, and hope, and wait.

We walk for three hours, slimed in sweat, struggling through the leaves, creepers, tendrils, vines, shoots, stems and stalks, over the colossal rotting trunks, into the slick algae-choked ponds. Birds and monkeys screeching in the trees. Agoutis stumbling off at our feet. Snakes. The trails of ants. And in the festering water, a tapir, big as a pregnant horse. I develop a terrible thirst (the pilot, of course, is custodian of our water supply). My throat is sore, lips gummed. I think of the stories I have heard — thirst-crazed explorers plunging their heads into those scummy pools, drinking deep of every foul and crippling disease known to man. And I think of the six shiny tins in my pack.

Suddenly we are stopping (halftime, I suppose). The pilot consults his compass, the great jaw working. Andrea, 97 percent exposed flesh, is like a first-aid dummy. Slashes, paper cuts, welts, sweet droplets of blood, a leech or two, insects spotting her skin like a terminal case of moles. We throw ourselves down in the wet, breathing hard. Things of the forest floor instantly dart up our pantlegs, down our collars. Andrea asks the pilot if he has the vaguest fucking idea of where we’re headed.

He frowns down at the compass.

She asks again.

He curses.

She holds up her middle finger.

The pilot takes a step toward her, lip curled back, when suddenly his expression goes soft. There is a look of surprise, of profound perplexity on his face, as if he’d just swallowed an ice cube. In his neck, a dart. A tiny thing, with feathers (picture a fishing lure pinned beneath his chin like a miniature bow tie). And then from the bushes, a sound like a hundred bums spitting in the gutter. Two more darts appear in the pilot’s neck, a fourth and fifth in his chest. He begins to giggle as if it were a great joke, then falls to his knees, tongue caught between his teeth. We watch, horror-struck. His eyes glaze, the arms twitch at his sides, the giggles rising like a wave, cresting higher, curling, and then breaking — he drops like a piece of flotsam, face down in the mulch.

We panic. The professor screams. Andrea snatches the pilot’s pistol and begins laying waste to the vegetation. I stretch out flat, secrete my head, wishing I had a blanket to pull over it. A random bullet sprays mud and leaf in my hair. The professor screams again. Andrea has shot him. In the eye. When I look up, the revolver is in her lap and she is fumbling with the magazine. There is a dart in her cheek. It is no time to lose consciousness. But I do.

Afternoon

I wake to the sound of human voices, the smell of smoke. I lie still, a wax doll, though something tears persistently at the spider-welt on my chest. My eye winks open: there is a campfire, nine or ten naked men squatting round it, eating. Gnawing at bones. Their skin is the color of stained walnut, their bodies lean as raw muscle, their lips distended with wooden disks. Each has a red band painted across his face at eye level, from the brow to the bridge of the nose, like a party mask. There is no trace of my late teammates.

I find I am suffering from anxiety, the image of the fly-blackened heads screeching through my mind like a flight of carrion birds, the quick dark voices and the sound of tooth on bone grating in my ears. I am on the verge of bolting. But at that moment I become aware of a new figure in the group — pasty white skin, red boils and blotches, a fallen, purplish mask. The cat man. Naked and flabby. His penis wrapped in bark, pubic hair plucked. I sit up. And suddenly the whole assembly is on its feet, fingers twitching at bowstrings and blowguns. The cat man motions with his hand and the weapons drop. Barefooted, he hobbles over to me, and the others turn back to their meal. “How you feeling?” he says, squatting beside me.

I crush an insect against my chest, rake my nails over the throbbing spider-welt. I opt for sincerity. “Like a piece of shit.”

He looks hard at me, deciding something. A fat fluffy tabby scampers across the clearing, begins rubbing itself against his thigh. I recognize Egmont. He strokes it, working his finger under the ribbon round its neck. “Don’t ask any questions,” he says. And then: “Listen: I’ve decided to help you — you were the only one who loved my little beauties, the only one who never meant us any harm….”

Evening

The last. It is nothing. I follow the brown back of my guide through the shadowy maze, always steering away from the swamps and tangles, sticking to high ground. The cat man has elected to stay behind, gone feral (once an ass, always an ass). Soured on civilization, he says, by his late experience. We have had a long talk. He whimpered and sputtered. Told me of his childhood, his morbid sensitivity — marked at birth, an outcast. He’s suffered all his life, and the experience with the downed plane brought it all home. The Txukahameis (that was his name for them) were different. Noble savages. They found him wandering, took him in, marveled over the beauty of his face, appointed him demichief, exacted his vengeance for him. There was a lot to like about them, he said. Home cooking. Sexual rites. Pet ocelots. No way he was leaving. But he wished me luck.

And so I follow the brown back. Five or six hours, and then I begin to detect it — faint and distant — the chuff and stutter of a diesel. Bulldozers, two or three of them. We draw closer, the noise swells. Step by step. I can smell the exhaust. Then my guide points in the direction of the blatting engines, parts the fronds, and vanishes.

I hurry for the building road, my blood churning, a smile cracking my lips — yes, I am thinking, the moment I step from the bush I’ll be a celebrity. In a month I’ll be rich. Talk shows, interviews, newspapers, magazines — a book, a film. (Birds caw, my feet rush, the bulldozers roar.) I can picture the book jacket … my face, jungle backdrop … title in red … Survivor I’ll call it — or Alive … no, something with more flair, more gut appeal, something dramatic, something with suffering in it. Something like— Green Hell.

(1976)

“So tell me, comrade, why do you wear your hair this way?”

Robert Jordan fingered the glistening, rock-hard corona of his spiked hair (dyed mud-brown now, with khaki highlights, for the sake of camouflage) and then loosened the cap of his flask and took a long burning hit of mescal. He waited till the flame was gone from his throat and the familiar glow lit his insides so that they felt radioactive, then leaned over the campfire to address the flat-faced old man in worn fatigues. “Because I shit in the milk of my mother, that’s why,” he said, the mescal abrading his voice. He caressed the copper stud that lay tight against the flange of his left nostril and wiped his hands with exaggerated care on his Hussong’s T-shirt. “And come to think of it,” he added, “because I shit in the milk of your mother too.”