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  The critics love Without a Hero

  “Sharp, rueful, malevolently funny…Mr. Boyle’s wry sense of the unnatural is so highly developed that it shows up everywhere…these stories are lean and focused, with slender, eccentric premises that need no further elaboration.”

  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “Gloriously comic…vintage Boyle…[these] stories are more than funny, better than wicked. They make you cringe with their clarity.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Boyle mixes entertainment and insight with words that will delight readers with a richness and intensity of their own…his sharply defined, varied group of characters don’t fall short of heroic status for lack of trying.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “In Without a Hero once more there is nothing casual or tired; the literary performances here retain Mr. Boyle’s astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy…his stories fill a reader with the giddy nausea of our cultural and theological confusions.”

  —Lorrie Moore, The New York Times Book Review

  “Wildly inventive…darkly satiric.…Boyle churns along at his hyperbolic best…he writes with a breathless vigor and stylistic panache…that makes you suspend, for a moment, any cares about the terra firma where more conventional stories are rooted.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WITHOUT A HERO

  T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of the novels A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East Is East, World’s End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Budding Prospects, and Water Music. His short story collections include T.C. Boyle Stories, Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey, and Without a Hero. His short fiction regularly appears in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire, and The Atlantic Monthly. Boyle was the recipient of the 1999 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

  ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  NOVELS

  The Road to Wellville

  East Is East

  World’s End

  Budding Prospects

  Water Music

  SHORT STORIES

  If the River Was Whiskey

  Greasy Lake

  Descent of Man

  WITHOUT

  A HERO

  Stories by

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1904

  Published in Penguin Books 1995

  14 16 18 20 19 17 15

  Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1994

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: Antaeus, “The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV”; Gentleman’s Quarterly, “Back in the Eocene,” “The Fog Man,” and “Without a Hero”; Granta, “Little America” and “Sitting on Top of the World”; Harper’s, “Hopes Rise” and “Top of the Food Chain”; The New Yorker, “Filthy with Things”; Playboy, “Beat,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “56-0” and “Respect”; Rolling Stone, “Big Game”; and Wigwag, “Acts of God.”

  Excerpt from “Poem Without a Hero” by Anna Akhmatova from Poems of Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. © 1972 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. By permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:

  Boyle, T. Coraghessan.

  Without a hero: stories/by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65157-5

  I. Title

  PS3552.O932W58 1994

  813’.54—dc20 93-35919

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Adobe New Caledonia

  Except in the United States of Amereica, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is publiushed and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green

  …all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger

  To her horror,…Dottie found herself having second thoughts; what if she had lost her virginity to a man who scared her and who sounded, from his own description, like a pretty bad hat?

  —MARY MCCARTHY, The Group

  Contents

  BIG GAME

  HOPES RISE

  FILTHY WITH THINGS

  WITHOUT A HERO

  RESPECT

  ACTS OF GOD

  BACK IN THE EOCENE

  CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

  THE 100 FACES OF DEATH, VOLUME IV

  56-0

  TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN

  LITTLE AMERICA

  BEAT

  THE FOG MAN

  SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD

  WITHOUT

  A HERO

  BIG GAME

  The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Green Hills of Africa

  YOU COULD SHOOT ANYTHING you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice. It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals—the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe—that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, either. He still regretted the time he’d let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes—even though he’d taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one. And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process, Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to. He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot
yet. Or the head. Of course, he was insured for that, too.

  Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain. He wasn’t exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes. He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree. He looked at the thing in amazement, as if he’d never seen it before—the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw—and made a mental note to offer a special on camels. The cigarette tasted like tin, like death. Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.

  The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off—there were just too many things that could go wrong. Half of them didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night. Worse: they didn’t seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a maître d’ and a water carrier. Dudes and greenhorns, all of them. Parvenus. Moneygrubbers. The kind of people who wouldn’t know class if it bit them.

  Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer. It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride. There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk. (Espinoza was out feeding the animals—Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance—and the new girl—what was her name?—hadn’t made it to work on time yet. Not once.) The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink somewhere—probably out behind the lion cages.

  For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:

  Mike and Nicole Bender

  Bender Realty

  15125 Ventura Blvd.

  Encino, California

  Real estate people. Jesus. He’d always preferred the movie crowd—or even the rock-and-rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos. At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff’s African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing—the Great Rift Valley, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti—but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster. And all they wanted to know was how much he’d paid for the place and was the land subdividable.

  He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him—the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties—and let out a sigh. Business was business, and in the long run it didn’t matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles—just as long as they paid. And they always paid, up front and in full. Bernard saw to that.

  “What was it, Nik, six months ago when we went to Gino Parducci’s for dinner? It was six months, wasn’t it? And didn’t I say we’d do the African thing in six months? Didn’t I?”

  Nicole Bender was curled up in the passenger seat of the white Jaguar XJS her husband had given her for Valentine’s Day. A pile of knitting magazines lay scattered in her lap, atop a set of bamboo needles trailing an embryonic garment in a shade so pale it defied categorization. She was twenty-seven, blond, a former actress/model/poet/singer whose trainer had told her just two days earlier that she had perhaps the most perfectly sculpted physique of any woman he’d ever worked with. Of course, he was paid to say things like that, but in her heart she suspected they were true, and she needed to hear them. She turned to her husband. “Yes,” she said. “You did. But I pictured us in Kenya or Tanzania, to tell the truth.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he fired back impatiently, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” the words coming so fast they might have been bullets squeezed from one of the glistening new big-bore rifles in the trunk, “but you know I can’t take six weeks off from work, not now when the new Beverly Hills office is about to open up and the Montemoretto deal is all but in the bag…and besides, it’s dangerous over there, what with the next revolution or war or whatever coming down every six minutes, and who do you think they’re going to blame when the roof caves in? White people, right? And where do you think you’ll want to be then?”

  Mike Bender was a barely contained factory of energy, a steamroller of a man who had risen from receptionist to king and despot of his own real estate empire in the space of twelve short years. He was given to speechifying, the precious words dropping from his lips like coins from a slot machine, his fingertips alighting on his tongue, his hair, his ears, the crotch of his pants and his elbows as he spoke, writhing with the nervous energy that had made him rich. “And plus you’ve got your tsetse flies and black mambas and beriberi and the plague and god knows what all over there—I mean, picture Mexico, only a hundred times worse. No, listen, trust me—Gino swore this place is as close as it gets to the real thing, only without the hassles.” He lowered his sunglasses to give her a look. “You’re telling me you really want to get your ass chewed off in some lopsided tent in, in”—he couldn’t seem to think of a place sufficiently grim, so he improvised—“Zambeziland?”

  Nicole shrugged, giving him a glimpse of the pouty little half-smile she used to work up for the photographers when she was nineteen and doing the summerwear ads for JCPenney.

  “You’ll get your zebra-skin rug yet, you wait and see,” Mike assured her, “and a couple lions’ heads and gazelles or whatever for the wall in the den, okay?”

  The Jaguar shot across the desert like a beam of light. Nicole lifted the knitting needles from her lap, thought better of it, and set them down again. “Okay,” she said in a breathy little whisper, “but I just hope this place isn’t too, you know, tacky.”

  A sudden harsh laugh erupted from the back seat, where Mike Bender’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, was stretched out supine with the last ten issues of Bop and a sixpack of New York Seltzer. “Get real, will you? I mean like shooting lions in Bakersfield? Tacky city. Tacky, tacky, tacky.”

  Up front, behind the wheel, his buttocks caressed by the supple kid leather of the seat and visions of bontebok leaping before his eyes, Mike Bender was mildly annoyed. He’d had an itch to hunt lion and elephant and rhino since he was a kid and first read Confessions of a White Hunter and the Classic Comics version of King Solomon’s Mines. And this was his chance. So maybe it wasn’t Africa, but who had the time to go on safari? If he could spare three days he was lucky. And you couldn’t shoot anything over there anyway. Not anymore. Everything was a preserve now, a game park, a conservancy. There were no more white hunters. Just photographers.

  He wanted to say “Give me a break, will you?” in his most imperious voice, the voice that sent his sales force scurrying for cover and his competitors into shock, but he held his peace. Nothing was going to ruin this for him. Nothing.

  It was midafternoon. The sun hung overhead like an egg shirred in a cup. The thermometer in the feed shed was pushing a hundred and fifteen degrees, nothing was moving but for the vultures aloft in the poor bleached expanse of the sky, and the whole world seemed to have gone to sleep. Except for Bernard. Bernard was beside himself—the Benders had been due at 10:00 A.M. and here it was quarter past two and still they hadn’t arrived. He’d had Espinoza let the Tommies and eland out of
their pens at nine, but he was afraid they’d all be lying up in the heat, and by noon he’d sent him out to round them up again. The giraffes were nowhere to be seen, and the elephant, tethered to a live oak Bernard had pruned to resemble an umbrella thorn, was looking as rumpled and dusty as a heap of Taiwanese luggage abandoned at the airport.

  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.