T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Bernard stood in the glare of the dried-up yard, squinting out on the screen of elephant grass and euphorbia he’d planted to hide the oil rig (if you knew it was there you could just detect the faintest motion of the big steel arm as it rose and fell and rose and fell again). He felt hopeless. For all the effort he’d put into it, the place looked like a circus camp, the bombed-out remains of a zoo, a dusty flat baking former almond ranch in the sun-blasted southeast corner of the San Joaquin Valley — which is exactly what it was. What would the Benders think? More important, what would they think at six hundred dollars a day, payable in advance, plus prices that ranged from a thousand a pop on the gazelles on up to twelve thousand for a lion and “priced as available” for the elephant? Real estate people had balked on him before, and business hadn’t exactly been booming lately.

The vultures wheeled overhead. He was running sweat. The sun felt like a firm hand steering him toward the cool of the kitchen and a tall glass of quinine water (which he drank for effect rather than therapeutic value: there wasn’t a malarial mosquito within a thousand miles). He was just about to pack it in when he caught the distant glint of sun on safety glass and saw the Benders’ car throwing up dust clouds at the far end of the drive.

“Roland!” he bellowed, and every mortal ounce of him was in motion now. “Let the monkeys out into the trees! And the parrots!” Suddenly he was jogging across the dusty lot and up the path to where the elephant lay collapsed beneath the tree. He was working at the slip of the tether to set her loose and wondering if Roland would have the sense to stir up the lions and hyenas for the sake of sound effects, when suddenly she rose to her feet with a great blowing snort and gave a feeble trumpet.

Well. And that was a break — at least now he wouldn’t have to use the ivory goad.

Bernard looked up at the old elephant in wonder — she still had a bit of showmanship in her, after all. Either that, or it was senile dementia. She was old — Bernard didn’t know quite how old, though he did know she was a veteran of thirty-eight years with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus who’d performed under the name “Bessie Bee” and responded to “Shamba”—that is, if you happened to have the ivory goad in your hand. Bernard shot a glance up the drive, where a white Jaguar sedan was beginning to define itself against a billowing backdrop of dust, and then he heard the screech of the monkeys as they shot out of their cages and up into the trees, and he began to compose himself. He forced a smile, all red-cheeked and long-toothed, cinched the leopard-skin belt, squared his pith helmet and marched forward to greet his guests.

By the time the Benders rolled up to the veranda, the parrots were in the trees, the marabou stork was pecking at a spot of offal in the dirt, and the lions were roaring lustily from their hidden pens out back. Roland, decked out in his Masai toga and lion’s-tooth necklace, bounded down the steps with alacrity to hold open the door for Bender, while Bessie Bee shambled around in the near distance, flapping her ears and blowing about in the dust. “Mr. Bender,” Bernard cried, extending his hand to a fortyish man in sunglasses and polo shirt, “welcome to Africa.”

Bender sprang out of the car like a child at the zoo. He was tall, lean, tanned — why did they all have to look like tennis pros? Bernard wondered — and stood there twitching a moment in the heat. He pumped Bernard’s hand professionally and then launched into a lip-jerking, ear-tugging, foot-thumping apology: “Sorry we’re late, Bernard, but my wife — have you met my wife? — my wife just had to get a couple rolls of film and we wound up buying out half of Reynoso’s Camera in Bakersfield — you know it? — good prices. Real good prices. Hell, we needed a new video camera anyway, especially with”—he gestured to take in the house, the outbuildings, the elephant, the monkeys in the trees and the sun-blasted plains beyond—“all this.”

Bernard was nodding, smiling, murmuring agreement, but he was on autopilot — his attention was fixed on the wife, whom Roland was fussing over now on the far side of the car. She raised her lovely white arms to fluff her hair and imprison her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and Bernard called out a greeting in his best British-colonial accent (though he was British by ancestry only and had never in his life been east of Reno). The second wife, of course, he was thinking as she returned his greeting with a vague little pouting smile.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Bernard said in response to some further idiocy from the husband’s lips, his watery blue eyes shifting to the daughter now — as black-headed as an Indian, and nearly as dark — and he saw right away that she was trouble, the sort of child who cultivates ugliness as a weapon.

Nicole Bender gave him a long slow appraisal over the hood of the car, and in the next moment he was ducking round the grille to squeeze her hand as if he were trying on a glove for size. “Beastly day,” he said, proud of the Britishism, and then he was leading her up the broad stone steps and into the house, while her husband fumbled with an armload of guns and the daughter slouched along behind, already complaining about something in a nagging querulous little whine of a voice.

“I’m not saying that, Mike — you’re not listening to me. I said the gazelles are very nice and they’ll be perfect for the office, but I wanted something, well, bigger for the front hall and at least three of the zebra — two for the den, I thought, and we’re going to need one for the ski lodge … you know, to hide that ugly paneling behind the bar?”

Mike Bender was deep into his fourth gin and tonic. Already the elation he’d felt over his first kill had begun to dissipate, replaced now by a gnawing sense of frustration and anger — why couldn’t Nikki shut her face, even for a second? No sooner had they changed clothes and got out there on the savannah or veldt or whatever you wanted to call it, than she’d started in. He’d squeezed off a clean shot at a Thomson’s gazelle at two hundred yards and before the thing’s head had hit the ground, she was running it down. Oh , she gasped, as if she’d been surprised on the toilet, but it’s so small, isn’t it? And then she struck a pose for Puff and the colored guy who carried the guns and skinned out the carcasses. Almost like a rabbit with horns.

And now the great white hunter was leaning across the table to reassure her, his gut drawn tight against the khaki safari shirt, his accent so phony it was like something out of a Monty Python routine. “Mrs. Bender, Nicole,” he began, mopping his blood blister of a face with a big checked handkerchief, “we’ll go out for zebra in the morning, when it’s cool, and if it’s three you want, we’ll get them, there’s no problem with that. Four, if you like. Five. If you’ve got the bullets, we’ve got the game.”

Mike watched as the canny crewcut head swiveled toward him. “And Mike,” Puff said, as amenable as any tour guide but with just the right hint of stagery in his voice, “in the evening, it’s the big stuff, the man-maker, old Simba himself.”

As if in response, there was a cough and roar from somewhere out beyond the darkened windows, and Mike Bender could feel the wildness of it on the thin night air — lion, the lion he’d dreamed about since his aunt had taken him to the Central Park Zoo as a boy and the roar of the great shaggy yellow-eyed things had shaken him to his primordial root. To be out there, in that African night that was haunted with predators, big-headed and thick-skinned, the pounce, the slash, the crack of sinew and bone — it was at once terrifying and wonderful. But what was that smell of oil?