T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
There are no roads, sidewalks, automobiles, bicycles or shoes on the island.
Tito is a grandson of Orlando’s uncle. Orlando’s uncle does not know it. The island’s population is just over three hundred. It is not surprising that a good number of the island’s inhabitants should be related to Orlando’s uncle, considering his energy. Tito does not live in the village, but in a shack in the jungle on the far side of the island. He lives alone, his eyes blue, his mother (now dead) English. Tito roams the forest with his .22, putting holes in birds and lizards. Their carcasses fertilize the soil. When he is hungry he lifts a lobster trap, spears fish, dives for conch. Or splits coconut.
The sun here is mellow as an orange. One day it will flare up and turn the solar system to cinders. Then it will fall into itself, suck in the ribbons of flame like a pale ember, gather its last breath and explode, driving particles eternally through the universe, cosmic wind.
Fran is forty, paints her toenails, wears her hair in short curls. The muscles of her abdomen are lax. She dresses in saris, halters, things of the tropics. Fifteen years ago Fran came to the island and set up residence in a ten-by-twenty-foot shack. For the first six months she had money. Afterward she cooked. Now she drinks rum beneath the bulb in her shack, finds coins for the island’s children, cooks meals for visitors and occasionally for islanders. No man, tourist or islander, has been known to satisfy more than a single appetite in Fran’s shack. Though not from lack of trying.
Coconut palms grow here, without (scrutable) design. The coconuts, elaborate seeds, fall to the sand like blows in the stomach. Wet from the rain, they lie cradled in the sand until one day they split. Coconut palms grow from the split coconuts, without (scrutable) design.
Tito and Ida have been observed walking hand in hand along the path to the far end of the island, the uninhabited crescent of bird and bush. In Tito’s right hand, Ida’s fingers; in his left, the .22. Ida’s face is wide, Indian, her eyes black. Black as caverns.
Conch fritters hiss on the griddle in Fran’s shack. Four lots away Orlando’s uncle sits in his yard, conch shells piled high, the wedge-headed hammer and thin knife at his side, a wet conch in his lap. He presses the spiral shell to his knee and taps at it with the beak of his hammer. Twice, three times, and he’s tapped a thin rectangular hole just below the point of the spiral. The knife eases in, the conch out, the shell in his hand spewing up its secrets. Konk he calls it.
I am sitting on the edge of Fran’s bed, sipping rum, chewing lobster. There is another man in the shack, a West German. He speaks neither English nor Spanish. We eat in silence. Fran wears a halter, her belly slack, at the stove. When we finish our meal the man stands, pays, leaves. I pour another drink of rum. Fran’s back is turned. I lay my hand on her flank. She tells me to leave.
In 1962 Hurricane Hilda stirred up waves thirty-five feet tall and churned them across the Caribbean in the direction of the island. The sky was smoky, dark as iron, the wind bent the trees, hurtled coconut and leaf. Tito and Ida were children, Fran was in her prime, Orlando’s uncle had never heard of Canada and was yet to father four more children. The reef broke the biggest waves. All the traps were lost, the boats staved in, the shacks collapsed. Eight feet of salt water (home to lobster, conch, brine shrimp) washed over the island. Five drowned. The wind screamed blood and teeth.
The Canadian woman takes the biweekly boat to the mainland and Orlando’s uncle is alone. I see him in the yard, feeding chickens and turkeys. His face is like a mud pond dried in the sun. But his hair is rich and black, he walks straight as a hoe and his arms and chest are solid. He no longer checks traps. Instead he cleans conch. Soaks the white meat in lime, sprinkles it with pepper, and exercises his aging teeth. The protein does him good.
There is no law on the island. No JP, no police, no jail.
At night I lie in my hammock, listening to the rattle of the crabs as they emerge from their burrows (dark to dark) and prowl through the scrub. I watch the sky: fronds like scissors, stars like frost. There are meteors, planets, spaces between the stars, black holes. The black holes are not visible, but there nonetheless. Stars bigger than the sun, collapsed in on themselves, with a gravitational pull that sucks in light like water down a drain. Black holes, black as the moments before birth and after death.
Ida’s toes in the sand, sea wrack, the shells of conch, heads of lobster. She strolls past the boats, past the trembling docks with the outhouses perched over them, past the crude gate and the chickens and the turkeys, on up to the door of Orlando’s uncle’s house. Her mother is Orlando’s uncle’s granddaughter. She knows it, and Orlando’s uncle knows it. Neither cares.
Between the shore and the reef is a stretch of about half a mile. The water is twenty or thirty feet deep, there are nests of rock, plains of sweeping thick-bladed grass, rolling like wheat in a deep wind. Among the blades, conch. The handsome flame-orange and pink shells turned to the dark bottom, the spiral peaks indicating the sky. You dive, snatch at the peaks, turn them over—they are ghostly and gray, a hole, black hole, tapped in the roof. The vacant shells frighten off the living conch, Orlando tells me, like a graveyard after dark.
Still in the afternoon heat, dogs chickens children asleep, the generator like the hum of an organ, there are cries in the air, sudden as ice, cries of passion and rhythm, the pressure of groin and groin, cries that squeeze between the planks of Orlando’s uncle’s shack like air escaping a brown paper bag.
Tito’s shack is difficult to find in the dark. For one thing, the island is washed in night after the generator shuts down. For another, the path is narrow, not much used. If you step off the path you run the risk of snapping an ankle in the ruts dug by the stone crabs or of touching down on the carcass of a bird or lizard, sharp plumage, wet meat.
The Canadian woman was not hurt, but Orlando’s uncle is dead. She’d been back two days, it was dark, she stepped out to squat and urinate. I’d heard them celebrating her return: I swung in my hammock, thinking prurient thoughts, listening. I heard the door slam, I heard the five shots. The man who came out by boat from the mainland dug a bullet from the headboard of the bed. It was a small caliber, .22 he said. He asked the islanders if any of them owned a .22. And he asked me. We knew of no one who owned a .22, we told him, and he returned to the mainland the following day. Dark and sudden, these events have adumbrated change. Fran and the Canadian woman live together now. I visit them two times a day, eat, sip rum, pay. Orlando’s uncle’s shack stood empty for a few weeks. Then I moved in.
Deep in the shadows I spread a towel across the ground. It is too dark to see them, but I know the holes are there, beneath the cloth, the island pocked with them like a sickness. She stretches her back there, drops her shorts. Her knees fall apart. The breeze drifts in from the sea, bare night sky above. The sand fleas are asleep. I kneel, work myself into her, poke at her mouth with my tongue. Ida, I whisper, burrowing into her, dark blood beating, rooting, thrusting, digging, deep as I can go. I want to dig deeper.
(1975)
LITTLE FUR PEOPLE
They wanted to take her babies away. Wanted to seize them by court order and deny her access to them as if she were some welfare mother smoking crack in the ghetto, as if she couldn’t nurse and doctor them herself though she’d been doing it all these years and when had there ever been a complaint? Even the rumor of a complaint? She was furious, but she was scared too, scared in a way that tugged at her bowels and made the roots of her hair ache as if she’d been suspended by her ponytail in some hellish high-wire act. Even her babies couldn’t comfort her, not at first, not after the door slammed behind the officer and all the gloom of the uncaring world rushed in to fill the house with the dismal fog of defeat.
And the day had begun so promisingly—that’s what made it all the worse. After two days of overcast, Grace had woken to a kitchen suffused with a sun so ripe and mellow it was as if she were standing inside an orange and looking out, and she just knew that Rudolfo would take his medicat
She opened the door on a nervous-looking young man with a pale cleanshaven expanse of upper lip and a puff of tawny beard clinging like plumage to the very tip of his chin. He was wearing a beige uniform with some sort of piping on the left shoulder and a circular patch over the breast pocket. His eyes—a dull, watery blue—stared out of his head in two different directions and his feet seemed to be working out the steps of some intricate dance routine on the doormat. “Mrs. Gargano?” he said, lifting his eyebrows and tightening the flesh round his mouth so that the flag of his beard seemed to stand at attention.
“Yes?” Grace said, with just the right blend of caution and hospitality—no matter how rude and venal the world might have become, she was always prepared to be gracious. The young man seemed to be looking beyond her at the knickknack shelf and her collection of ceramic figurines, though it was hard to say with those roving eyes. Suddenly she was overcome by a wave of pity—what must his mother have thought when she pressed him to her breast for the first time?—and she saw herself offering him a cup of tea and a slice of the banana nut bread she’d baked for her daughter, Jet.
“I’m Officer Kraybill,” he said, “of Fish and Game? We’ve had a complaint.”
It was then that she saw the curtains stir in the front window of the house across the street—Gladys Tranh’s house—and she had her first intimation of what was coming. “A complaint?”
“Yes,” the young man said, and his eyes had pulled into focus now, both of them locked on her face with a sudden intensity that made her wilt. “We understand you’re harboring wild animals on the premises.”
“Wild—?” For a moment, that was all she could manage to say, but she looked at him again, looked at him harder, and recovered herself. “Well, no. Not at all. There’s just my babies—”
“Babies?”
“My squirrels—my sick ones, the ones in need. People have been bringing them to me for years….”
Officer Kraybill’s jaw sagged and then composed itself again. His eyes were all over the place. He smiled—or tried to. “Mind if I have a look? I mean, if it’s not too much trouble, would you show them to me?”
Everything hung in the balance, but she didn’t know, didn’t suspect—she was too much an innocent, too trusting, too willing to judge a stranger by his poor homely walleyed face. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, but her tone was the tone of a woman who wants to be persuaded, “—I have a beauty parlor appointment at eleven….”
“It wouldn’t take a minute,” he said, coming right back at her. “I’d just like a look, to see what you’re doing—with the sick ones, I mean.”
And that was it, that was what got her: how could she resist anyone who spoke of her sick ones, her poor ailing babies? She opened the door wide and Officer Kraybill, with his misaligned eyes and insinuating beard, was in the house.
He lingered a moment over the ceramic squirrels—“Aren’t they precious?” she said. “They’re from Surrey, England, the ‘Squirrels of the World’ collection?”—and then she invited him into the living room. Misty and Bruno were there, stretched out on the sofa watching a “Lassie” rerun, a show that never failed to excite them. Whenever the collie barked out a message to his master, Bruno would stand up on his hind legs and chitter at the screen while Misty spun cartwheels across the rug. It was quite a sight, cute as pie, but as Grace stepped into the room with Officer Kraybill, both squirrels were lounging on their bellies contemplating a revolutionary new cheese slicer from Sweden. “That’s Misty,” Grace said, “the little Douglas’s? And the gray squirrel is Bruno. They’re inseparable. Like brother and sister.”
“Are they sick?” Officer Kraybill wanted to know.
“Sick?” she echoed, freezing him with a look of astonishment even as the image of the cheese slicer was replaced by that of a collie vaulting a white picket fence. “Why, they wouldn’t last ten minutes if I let them out the door.”
Still playing dumb, still stringing her along, Officer Kraybill lifted his eyebrows and let his wet eyes settle on her. “What’s wrong with them?”
Jet had warned her not to lecture people, but Grace couldn’t help herself, she just couldn’t—this was her life. “Misty’s been with me three years now—or almost three years; let’s see, it’ll be three in April. She was partially eviscerated by a Cadillac in Rancho Park and she’d gone into a coma before she was brought here—for the first week it was touch and go. Dr. Diaz got her patched up, but then we discovered she was diabetic—oh, yes, squirrels contract diabetes, just like people—and she requires two shots of insulin a day. Without it she’d go into shock and die.”
The officer had moved closer to the couch and he was peering down at Misty, his expression noncommittal.
“And Bruno,” she said, rushing on—and so what if Jet thought she put people off, that didn’t matter a whit, not where her babies were concerned—“Bruno’s been with me over six years now. He’s my favorite, except for Phil, of course, and I don’t mind admitting it.” She pinched her voice in a soft crooning falsetto: “Here, Bruno, come on, baby, come on.” Bruno twisted his neck to fasten his black glittering eyes on her and then, though you could see he was racked with pain, he hauled himself up the slope of the couch and made a feeble leap into her arms. “That’s right,” she crooned, bending to peck him a kiss.
Officer Kraybill cleared his throat.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to get carried away—it’s just that they’re so lovable, they are…. Well Bruno, Bruno suffers from arthritis and lumbago, and when he first came to me—here, you can see it here, along the base of his spine?—he’d lost the better part of his tail in an accident involving a Weber charcoal grill. And while that may not sound like much to you, you have to understand what something like that will do to a squirrel’s self-respect. I mean, his tail is everything—his blanket and pillow, his napkin, his new suit of clothes—and he flags every female in the forest with it. Bruno was devastated. Mr. Kraybill, you never saw such a depressed squirrel.”
But Officer Kraybill didn’t seem to be focusing on Bruno. He was scribbling something in a little leatherbound notebook. “And how many others do you have?” he asked, his voice flat and mechanical.
“You’re taking notes?” she said, and for the first time the gravity of the situation began to dawn on her.
“Just a formality,” he told her, but his wild eye betrayed him. “We’ve had a complaint. I’ve got to check it out. Now, how many do you have in all?”
“Thirty-two,” Grace said, tight-lipped. She cradled Bruno in her arms, afraid suddenly. “But why do you need to know? What sort of complaint was it?” She tried out a nervous laugh. “You don’t—I mean, I’m not doing anything wrong, am I?”
“And where do you keep them?” he said, ignoring the question. “Besides these two?”
Grace tried to compose herself. There’d been a complaint, that was all, nothing to get excited about. “I’ve got cages in the garage—but at any given time of the day, the squirrels have the run of the house. They’re litter-trained, you know, each and every one of them, even the pair that just came to me last week. Don’t think I keep them cooped up—I’d never do that. And I clean the cages daily, without fail—”
“I’d like to see the cages.” He was facing her, pen poised over the notebook, and he was no longer asking.
There was a silence. From the TV came the sound
It was then that the door from the garage pushed open ever so slightly and Phil crawled in. There he was, tacked to the rug and looking up inquisitively at the visitor, not a trace of fear in him, while the sounds of the others—a contented mid-morning chatter—drifted through the doorway. And the smell. The smell too. Grace felt she had to offer an explanation. “Don’t mind that musty odor,” she said, “that’s natural. I could scrub the cages and change the wood shavings a hundred times a day and it’d still be there—think of it as their natural perfume. And this”—indicating the big yellow and chocolate Douglas’s squirrel at their feet—“this is Phil.”
“And he’s sick too, right?”
She gave the man a look. Was he trying to be rude? Her voice turned cold. “Phil was mauled by a pit bull. He required sixty-seven stitches to close his wounds and he will never have the use of his rear legs again. I’ll have you know, what with his various ailments, that I’ve taken him to Dr. Diaz over seventy times in the past two years.”