T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

But that wasn’t all: there remained the motive. When dragged before the nawab in chains and condemned to death by peine fort et dure , the beggar master spat forth his venom. “Don’t you recognize me?” he taunted the nawab. “Look closer.” Understanding animated the nawab’s features and a low exclamation escaped his lips: “Rajendra!” he gasped. “Yes,” sneered the beggar master, “the same. The man you wronged thirty-five years ago when you set your filthy minions on me, burned my house and barn to the ground, and took my wife for your own first begum. She turned her back on me for your promises, and you turned me out of the state to wander begging the rest of my life. I have had my revenge. The nawab had broken down in tears, the beggar master was hauled off to be tortured to death, and the nine tongueless children were brought home to be instructed in sign language by Miss Compton-Divot, who became engaged to marry Mr. Bagwas the following week.

And so ends the baffling and ever-surprising case of the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota. I did not show the governess’s letter to Beersley, incidentally. I felt that he’d been under an unnatural strain over the course of the past several months, and determined instead to take him for a rest cure to a little hotel in the grassy hills of the Punjab, a place that, so they say, bears a striking resemblance to Hertfordshire.

There was nothing wrong with his appendix — no stitch in the side, no inflammation, no pain — but Bayard was having it out. For safety’s sake. He’d read an article once about an anthropologist who’d gone to Malaysia to study the social habits of the orangutan and died horribly when her appendix had burst three hundred miles from the nearest hospital; as she lay writhing in her death agony the distraught apes had hauled her halfway up a jack-fruit tree, where she was found several days later by a photographer from Life magazine. The picture — splayed limbs, gouty face, leaves like a mouthful of teeth — was indelible with him. She’d been unprepared, that anthropologist, inattentive to the little details that can make or break you. Bayard was taking no such chances.

At their first meeting, the surgeon had been skeptical. “You’re going to Montana, Mr. Wemp, not Borneo. There are hospitals there, all the modern facilities.”

“It’s got to go, doctor,” Bayard had quietly insisted, looking up with perfect composure from the knot of his folded hands.

“Listen, Mr. Wemp. I’ve got to tell you that every surgical procedure, however routine, involves risk”—the doctor paused to let this sink in—“and I really feel the risks outweigh the gains in this case. All the tests are negative — we have no indication of a potential problem here.”

“But doctor—” Bayard felt himself at a loss for words. How explain to this earnest, assured man with the suntanned wife, the Mercedes, and the house in Malibu that all of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York — civilization itself — was on the brink of a catastrophe that would make the Dark Ages look like a Sunday-afternoon softball game? How intimate the horrors that lay ahead, the privation, the suffering? He remembered Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Some would be prepared, others would not. “You just don’t understand how isolated I’m going to be,” he said finally.

Isolated, yes. Thirty-five acres in Bounceback, Montana, population thirty-seven. The closest town with a hospital, bank, or restaurant was Missoula, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, an hour of it on washboard dirt. Bayard would have his own well, a cleared acre for vegetable farming, and a four-room cabin with wood stove, electrical generator, and a radiation-proof cellar stocked with a five-year supply of canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs. The whole thing was the brainchild of Sam Arkson, a real-estate developer who specialized in subsistence plots, bomb shelters, and survival homes. Bayard’s firm had done some PR work for one of Arkson’s companies — Thrive, Inc. — and as he looked into the literature of catastrophe, Bayard had found himself growing ever more uncertain about the direction of his own life. Remember the gas crisis? asked one of Arkson’s pamphlets. An inconvenience, right? The have-nots stepping on the haves. But what about the food crisis around the corner? Have you thought about what you’ll do when they close up the supermarkets with a sign that says “Sorry, Temporarily Out of Food”?

Bayard would never forget the day he’d come across that pamphlet. His palms had begun to sweat as he read on, gauging the effect of nuclear war on the food and water supply, thinking of life without toilet paper, toothpaste, or condiments, summoning images of the imminent economic depression, the starving masses, the dark-skinned marauding hordes pouring across our borders from the south to take, take, take with their greedy, desperate, clutching hands. That night he’d gone home in a cold sweat, visions of apocalypse dancing in his head. Fran made him a drink, but he couldn’t taste it. The girls showed him their schoolwork — the sweet, ingenuous loops of their penmanship, the pale watercolors and gold stars — and he felt the tears start up in his eyes. They were doomed, he was doomed, the world sinking like a stone. After they’d gone to bed he slipped out to the kitchen and silently pulled back the refrigerator door. Inside he found a head of deliquescing lettuce, half a gallon of milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chutney, a jar of capers so ancient it might have been unearthed in a tomb, a pint of butter-brickle ice cream, and a single Mexicali Belle TV dinner. The larder yielded two cans of pickled Chinese mushrooms, half a dozen packages of artificial rice pudding, and a lone box of Yodo Crunch cereal, three-quarters empty. He felt sick. Talk about a prolonged siege — they didn’t even have breakfast.

That night his dreams had tentacles. He woke feeling strangled. The coffee was poisonous, the newspaper rife with innuendo, each story, each detail cutting into him with the sharp edge of doom. A major quake was on the way, the hills were on fire, there was murder and mayhem in Hollywood, AIDS was spreading to the heterosexual population, Kaddafi had the bomb. Outside sat the traffic. Three million cars, creeping, spitting, killing the atmosphere, inching toward gridlock. The faces of the drivers were impassive. Shift, lurch, advance, stop, shift, lurch. Didn’t they know the whole world had gone hollow, rotten like a tooth? Didn’t they know they were dead? He looked into their eyes and saw empty sockets, looked into their faces and saw the death’s head. At work it was no better. The secretaries greeted him as if money mattered, as if there were time to breathe, go out to Chan Dara for lunch, and get felt up in the Xerox room; his colleagues were as bland as cue balls, nattering on about baseball, stocks, VCRs, and food processors. He staggered down the hallway as if he’d been hit in the vitals, slamming into the sanctuary of his office like a hunted beast. And there, on his desk, as if it were the bony pointed finger of the Grim Reaper himself, was Arkson’s pamphlet.

By two-thirty that afternoon he was perched on a chair in Sam Arkson’s San Diego office, talking hard-core survival with the impresario himself. Arkson sat behind a desk the size of a trampoline, looking alternately youthful and fissured with age — he could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. Aggressively tanned and conscientiously muscled, his hair cut so close to the scalp it might have been painted on, he resembled nothing so much as a professional sweat meister, Vic Tanny fighting the waistline bulge, Jack La Lanne with a Mohawk. He was dressed in fatigues and wore a khaki tie. “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair and sizing up Bayard with a shrewd, unforgiving gaze, “are you on for the long haul or do you just need a security blanket?”