T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“Hey — let’s slip down to the deli and get some sandwiches and doughnuts and coffee and shit, sneak back, and surprise the rest of the crew,” Gesh said.

Curiosity stirred me, and hunger too. But my stomach curdled at the thought of the gore and the stink, the yard like a deserted battlefield. I stared down at my pajama sleeve. Amy’s sleeping wrist lay across mine. I studied the delicate contrast of her white wrist and the little pink and brown figures of cowboys on my pajamas. “Well? What do you say?” asked Gesh. I said I guessed so. We pulled on our corduroys, our white rubber boots, our mohair sweaters.

Downstairs the blood had begun to clot. In the hallway it was still sticky in places, but for the most part crusted dry. Outside a massive fibrinogenification was taking place under a dirt-brown sky. Scabs like thin coats of ice were forming over the deeper puddles; the mud was crusting underfoot: fresh blood ran off in streams and drainage ditches; the trees drooled clots of it in the hot breeze. “Wow! Dig that sky, bro—” Gesh said. “Brown as a turd.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s weird. But thank christ it stopped bleeding.”

Gesh started the car while I broke the scab-crust from the windshield; it flaked, and crumbled in dusty grains. I climbed in, laid some newspaper over the day-old vomit on the floor, steeled myself against the stench. Gesh accelerated in an attempt to back out from the wall: I could hear the wheels spinning. I poked my head out. We were stuck up to the frame in mud and gore. “Fuck it,” Gesh said. “We’ll take Scott’s car.” We started up the drive toward the other car. It was then that the first pasty lumps of it began to slap down sporadically; we reached the shelter of the porch just as it began to thunder down, heavy, feculent, and wet.

Upstairs we carefully folded our sweaters, pulled on our white pajamas, and sought out the warm spots in the huddled sleeping mass of us.

(1972)

It was on a dark, lowering day during one of the interstices of the monsoon that His Royal Highness Yadavindra Singh, nawab of the remote Deccan state of Sivani-Hoota, began to miss his children. That is, the children began to turn up missing, and to an alarming degree. It began with little Gopal, who had been born with a mottled, pale birthmark in the shape of a half moon under the crease of his left buttock. Miss Elspeth Compton-Divot, the children’s English governess, whose responsibility it was to instruct her wards in the dead language and living literature of Greece and to keep watch over them as a shepherd keeps watch over his flock (flock, indeed — there were twenty-five sibling Singhs under her care originally), was the first to discover little Gopal’s absence. She bowed her way into the nawab’s reception room immediately after lessons on that fateful afternoon, the sky so striped with cloud it might have been flayed, to find the nawab and his wife, the third begum, in attendance on several prominent local figures, including Mr. Bagwas the rubber-goods proprietor and Mr. Patel the grain merchant. “Most High, Puissant, Royal and Wise Hegemon Whose Duty It Is to Bring the Word of God and the Will of Just Government to the Peoples of Sivani-Hoota and Environs,” she began, “I come before you on a matter of gravest import.”

The nawab, a man in late middle age who had attended Oxford in the days of Pater and was given to ejaculations like “What ho!” and “L’art pour l’art!” told her to stuff the formality and come to the point.

“It’s your third youngest, sir — little Gopal.”

“Yes?”

“He seems to have disappeared.”

The nawab shifted his bulk uneasily in his chair — for he was a big man, fattened on ghee, sweet cream, and chapattis slathered with orange-blossom honey — glanced at his begum and then expelled a great exasperated puff of air. “What a damnable nuisance,” he said. “I don’t doubt the little beggar’s up to some mischief, hiding himself in the servants’ pantry or some such rot. Which one did you say it was?”

“Little Gopal, sir.”

“Gopal?”

It was then that the begum spoke rapidly to her husband in Tamil and he began almost simultaneously to nod his head, muttering, “Yes, yes, a good boy that. A pity, a real pity.”

The governess went on to explain the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance — the testimony of the night nurse who’d put him to bed, his eldest-brother-but-six’s assertion that they’d played together at cribbage before falling off to sleep, her own discovery of little Gopal’s absence early that day, when she commenced morning lessons by comparing her seating chart with the nearly identical moon-shaped grinning brown faces of the nawab’s brood.

Mr. Bagwas, who had been silently pulling at a clay pipe through all of this, abruptly pronounced a single word: “Leopards.”

But it was not leopards. Though the stealthy cats commonly carried off six or seven of the village’s children a night, the occasional toothless grandmother, and innumerable goats, dogs, cows, fowl, royal turtles, and even the ornamental koi that graced the nawab’s ponds, they were absolved of suspicion in the present case. After Abha, aged seven, and then the eleven-year-old Shanker vanished on successive nights, the nawab, becoming concerned, called in Mr. Hugh Tureen, game hunter, to put out baits and exterminate the spotted fiends. Though in the course of the ensuing week Mr. Tureen shot some seventy-three leopards, sixteen tigers, twelve wolves, and several hundred skunks, mongeese, badgers, and the like, the nawab continued to lose children. Santha, aged nine and with the mark of the dung beetle on the arches of both feet, vanished under the noses of three night nurses and half a dozen watchmen specially employed to stand guard over the nursery. This time, however, there was a clue. Bhupinder, aged six, claimed to have seen a mysterious shrouded figure hanging over his sister’s bed, a figure rather like that of an ape on whom a tent has collapsed. Two days later, when the harsh Indian sun poked like a lance into the muslin-hung sanctuary of the children’s quarters, Bhupinder’s bed was empty.

The nawab and his begum, who two and a half weeks earlier had been rich in children, now had but twenty. They were distraught. Helpless. At their wits’ end. Clearly, this was a case for Rupert Beersley.

We left Calcutta in a downpour, Beersley and I, huddled in our mackintoshes like a pair of dacoits. The train was three hours late, the tea was wretched, and the steward served up an unpalatable mess of curried rice that Beersley, in a fit of pique, overturned on the floor. Out of necessity — Beersley’s summons had curtailed my supper at the club — I ate my own portion and took a cup of native beer with it. “Really,” Beersley said, the flanges of his extraordinary nostrils drawn up in disgust, “how can you eat that slop?”

It was a sore point between us, the question of native food, going all the way back to our first meeting at Cawnpore some twenty years back, when he was a freshly commissioned young leftenant in the Eleventh Light Dragoons, India Corps, and I a seasoned sergeant-major. “I’ll admit I’ve had better, old boy,” I said, “but one must adapt oneself to one’s circumstances.”

Beersley waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal and quoted sourly from his favorite poem — indeed, the only poem from which he ever quoted — Keats’s “Lamia”: “’Not three score old, yet of sciential brain / To unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain.’”

An electric-green fly had settled itself on a congealed lamp of rice that lay on the table before us. I shrugged and lifted the fork to my mouth.