T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Cell?” Ken echoed.

  “In the hive,” Anthony said. “The big hive.”

  It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy’s poor singed carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced—Pat wouldn’t, couldn’t cook in it, ever again. It was Ken too who lost control of himself that night and slapped Anthony’s sick pale swollen face till Pat pulled him off. In the end, Anthony got his hive, thirty thousand honeybees in a big white wooden box with fifteen frames inside, and Barebaum got to see Anthony two more days a week.

  At first, the bees seemed to exert a soothing influence on the boy. He stopped muttering to himself, used his utensils at the table, and didn’t seem quite as vulnerable to mood swings as he had. After school and his daily sessions with Barebaum, he’d spend hours tending the hive, watching the bees at their compulsive work, humming softly to himself as if in a trance. Ken was worried he’d be stung and bought him a gauze bonnet and gloves, but he rarely wore them. And when he was stung—daily, it seemed—he displayed the contusions proudly, as if they were battle scars. For Ken and Pat, it was a time of accommodation, and they were quietly optimistic. Gone was the smiling boy they’d taken into their home, but at least now he wasn’t so—there was no other word for it—so odd, and he seemed less agitated, less ready to fly off the handle.

  The suicide attempt took them by surprise.

  Ken found him, at dusk, crouched beneath the hive and quietly bleeding from both wrists. Pat’s X-ACTO knife lay in the grass beside him, black with blood. In the hospital the next day, Anthony looked lost and vulnerable, looked like a little boy again. Barebaum was there with them. “It’s a phase,” he said, puffing for breath. “He’s been very depressed lately.”

  “Why?” Pat asked, sweeping Anthony’s hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. “Your bees,” she choked. “What would your bees do without you?”

  Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

  They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He’d contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers—Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone were killing them—but Pat overruled him. “He needs us,” she said. “He has no one else to turn to.” They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she said.

  “Easy?” he retorted. “You talk like it’s a war or something. I didn’t adopt a kid to go to war—or to save the world either.”

  “Why did you adopt him then?”

  The question took him by surprise. He looked past Pat to the kitchen, where one of Anthony’s crayon drawings—of a lopsided bee—clung to the refrigerator door, and then past the refrigerator to the window, and the lush still yard beyond. He shrugged. “For love, I guess.”

  As it turned out, the question was moot—Anthony didn’t last six months this time. When they picked him up at the hospital—“Hospital,” Ken growled, “nut hatch is more like it”—they barely recognized him. He was taller and he’d put on weight. Pat couldn’t call it baby fat anymore—this was true fat, adult fat, fat that sank his eyes and strained at the seams of his pants. And his hair, his rich fine white-blond hair, was gone, shaved to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham. Pat chattered at him, but he got into the car without a word. Halfway home he spoke for the first time. “You know what they eat in there,” he said, “in the hospital?”

  Ken felt like the straightman in a comedy routine. “What do they eat?” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

  “Shit,” Anthony said. “They eat shit. Their own shit. That’s what they eat.”

  “Do you have to use that language?”

  Anthony didn’t bother to respond.

  At home, they discovered that the bees had managed to survive on their own, a fact that somehow seemed to depress Anthony, and after shuffling halfheartedly through the trays and getting stung six or seven times, he went up to bed.

  The trouble—the final trouble, the trouble that was to take Anthony out of their hands for good—started at school. Anthony was almost twelve now, but because of his various problems, he was still in fifth grade. He was in a special program, of course, but he took lunch and recess with the other fifth-graders. On the playground, he towered over them, plainly visible a hundred yards away, like some great unmoving statue of the Buddha. The other children shied away from him instinctively, as if they knew he was beyond taunting, beyond simple joys and simple sorrows. But he was aware of them, aware in a new way, aware of the girls especially. Something had happened inside him while he was away—“Puberty,” Barebaum said, “he has urges like any other boy”—and he didn’t know how to express it.

  One afternoon, he and Oliver Monteiros, another boy from the special program, cornered a fifth-grade girl behind one of the temporary classrooms. There they “stretched” her, as Anthony later told it—Oliver had her hands, Anthony her feet—stretched her till something snapped in her shoulder and Anthony felt his pants go wet. He tried to tell the principal about it, about the wetness in his pants, but the principal wouldn’t listen. Dr. Conarroe was a gray-bearded black man who believed in dispensing instant justice. He was angry, gesturing in their faces, his beard jabbing at them like a weapon. When Anthony unzipped his fly to show him what had happened, Dr. Conarroe suspended him on the spot.

  Pat spoke with Anthony, and they both—she and Ken—went in to meet with Dr. Conarroe and the members of the school board. They brought Barebaum with them. Together, they were able to overcome the principal’s resistance, and Anthony, after a week’s suspension, was readmitted. “One more incident,” Conarroe said, his eyes aflame behind the discs of his wire-framed glasses, “and I don’t care how small it is, and he’s out. Is that understood?”

  At least Anthony didn’t keep them in suspense. On his first day back he tracked down the girl he’d stretched, chased her into the girls’ room, and as he told it, put his “stinger” in her. The girl’s parents sued the school district, Anthony was taken into custody and remanded to Juvenile Hall following another nine-month stay at Hart, and Ken and Pat finally threw in the towel. They were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and they were in debt to Barebaum for some thirty thousand dollars above what their insurance would cover. They felt cheated, bitter, worn down to nothing. Anthony was gone, adoption a sick joke. But they had each other, and after a while—and with the help of Skippy II—they began to pick up the pieces.

  And now, six years later, Anthony had come back to haunt them. Ken was enraged. He, for one, wasn’t about to be chased out of this house and this job—they’d moved once, and that was enough. If he’d found them, he’d found them—so much the worse. But this was America, and they had their rights too. While Pat took Skippy to the kennel for safekeeping, Ken phoned the police and explained the situation to an Officer Ocksler, a man whose voice was so lacking in inflection he might as well have been dead. Ken was describing the incident with Skippy the First when Officer Ocksler interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a faint animation to his voice now, as if he were fighting down a belch or passing gas, “but there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Nothing you can do?” Ken couldn’t help himself: he was practically yelping. “But he broiled a harmless puppy in the oven, raped a fifth-grade girl, sent us thirty-two death threats, and tracked us down even though we quit our jobs, packed up and moved, and left no forwarding address.” He took a deep breath. “He thinks he’s a bee, for christsake.”

  Officer Ocksler inserted his voice into the howling silence that succeeded this outburst. “He commits a crime,” he said, the words stuck fast in his throat, “you call us.”

  The next day’s mail brought the second threat. It came in the form of a picture postcard, addressed
to Pat, and postmarked locally. The picture—a Japanese print—showed a pale fleshy couple engaged in the act of love. The message, which took some deciphering, read as follows:

  Dear Mother Pat,

  I’m a King Bee,

  Gonna buzz round your hive,

  Together we can make honey

  Let me come inside.

  Your son, Anthony

  Ken tore it to pieces. He was red in the face, trembling. White babies, he thought bitterly. An older child. They would have been better off with a seven-foot Bantu, an Eskimo, anything. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “He comes here, I’ll kill him.”

  It was early the next morning—Pat was in the kitchen, Ken upstairs shaving—when a face appeared in the kitchen window. It was a large and familiar face, transformed somewhat by the passage of the years and the accumulation of flesh, but unmistakable nonetheless. Pat, who was leaning over the sink to rinse her coffee cup, gave a little gasp of recognition.

  Anthony was smiling, beaming at her like the towheaded boy in the photograph she’d kept in her wallet all these years. He was smiling, and suddenly that was all that mattered to her. The sweetness of those first few months came back in a rush—he was her boy, her own, and the rest of it was nothing—and before she knew what she was doing she had the back door open. It was a mistake. The moment the door swung open, she heard them. Bees. A swarm that blackened the side of the house, the angry hiss of their wings like grease in a fryer. They were right there, right beside the door. First one bee, then another, shot past her head. “Mom,” Anthony said, stepping up onto the porch, “I’m home.”

  She was stunned. It wasn’t just the bees, but Anthony. He was huge, six feet tall at least, and so heavy. His pants—they were pajamas, hospital-issue—were big as a tent, and it looked as if he’d rolled up a carpet beneath his shirt. She could barely make out his eyes, sunk in their pockets of flesh. She didn’t know what to say.

  He took hold of the door. “I want a hug,” he said, “give me a hug.”

  She backed away from him instinctively. “Ken!” she called, and the catch in her throat turned it into a mournful, drawnout bleat. “Ken!”

  Anthony was poised on the threshold. His smile faded. Then, like a magician, he reached out his hand and plunged it into the mass of bees. She saw him wince as he was stung, heard the harsh sizzle of the insects rise in crescendo, and then he drew back his hand, ever so slowly, and the bees came with him. They moved so fast—glutinous, like meringue clinging to a spoon—that she nearly missed it. There was something in his hand, a tiny box, some sort of mesh, and then his hand was gone, his arm, the right side of his body, his face and head and the left side too. Suddenly he was alive with bees, wearing them, a humming, pulsating ball of them.

  She felt a sharp pain in her ankle, then another at her throat. She backed up a step.

  “You sent me away,” Anthony scolded, and the bees clung to his lips. “You never loved me. Nobody ever loved me.”

  She heard Ken behind her—“What is this?” he said, and then a weak curse escaped him—but she couldn’t turn. The hum of the bees mesmerized her. They clung to Anthony, one mind, thirty thousand bodies.

  And then the blazing ball of Anthony’s hand separated itself from his body and his bee-thick fingers opened to reveal the briefest glimpse of the gauze-covered box. “The queen,” Anthony said. “I throw her down and you’re”—she could barely hear him, the bees raging, Ken shouting out her name—“you’re history. Both of you.”

  For a long moment Anthony stood there motionless, afloat in bees. Huge as he was, he seemed to hover over the linoleum, derealized in the mass of them. And then she knew what was going to happen, knew that she was barren then and now and forever and that it was meant to be, and that this, her only child, was beyond human help or understanding.

  “Go away,” Anthony said, the swarm thrilling louder, “go … into the … next room … before, before—” and then Ken had her by the arm and they were moving. She thought she heard Anthony sigh, and as she darted a glance back over her shoulder he crushed the box with a snap loud as the crack of a limb. There was an answering roar from the bees, and in her last glimpse of him he was falling, borne down by the terrible animate weight of them.

  “I’ll kill him,” Ken spat, his shoulder pressed to the parlor door. Bees rattled against the panels like hailstones.

  She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt a sudden stab under her collar, and then another. Ken’s words didn’t make sense—Anthony was gone from them now, gone forever—didn’t he understand that? She listened to the bees raging round her kitchen, stinging blindly, dying for their queen. And then she thought of Anthony, poor Anthony, in his foster homes, in the hospital, in prison, thought of his flesh scored a thousand, ten thousand times, wound in his cerement of bees.

  He was wrong, she thought, leaning into the door as if bracing herself against a storm, they do have mercy. They do.

  (1988)

  SINKING HOUSE

  When Monty’s last breath caught somewhere in the back of his throat with a sound like the tired wheeze of an old screen door, the first thing she did was turn on the water. She leaned over him a minute to make sure, then she wiped her hands on her dress and shuffled into the kitchen. Her fingers trembled as she jerked at the lever and felt the water surge against the porcelain. Steam rose in her face; a glitter of liquid leapt for the drain. Croak, that’s what they called it. Now she knew why. She left the faucet running in the kitchen and crossed the gloomy expanse of the living room, swung down the hallway to the guest bedroom, and turned on both taps in the bathroom there. It was almost as an afterthought that she decided to fill the tub too.

  For a long while she sat in the leather armchair in the living room. The sound of running water—pure, baptismal, as uncomplicated as the murmur of a brook in Vermont or a toilet at the Waldorf—soothed her. It trickled and trilled, burbling from either side of the house and driving down the terrible silence that crouched in the bedroom over the lifeless form of her husband.

  The afternoon was gone and the sun plunging into the canopy of the big eucalyptus behind the Finkelsteins’ when she finally pushed herself up from the chair. Head down, arms moving stiffly at her sides, she scuffed out the back door, crossed the patio, and bent to turn on the sprinklers. They sputtered and spat—not enough pressure, that much she understood—but finally came to life in halfhearted umbrellas of mist. She left the hose trickling in the rose garden, then went back into the house, passed through the living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom—not even a glance for Monty, no: she wouldn’t look at him, not yet—and on into the master bath. The taps were weak, barely a trickle, but she left them on anyway, then flushed the toilet and pinned down the float with the brick Monty had used as a doorstop. And then finally, so weary she could barely lift her arms, she leaned into the stall and flipped on the shower.

  Two weeks after the ambulance came for the old man next door, Meg Terwilliger was doing her stretching exercises on the prayer rug in the sunroom, a menthol cigarette glowing in the ashtray on the floor beside her, the new CD by Sandee and the Sharks thumping out of the big speakers in the corners. Meg was twenty-three, with the fine bones and haunted eyes of a poster child. She wore her black hair cut close at the temples, long in front, and she used a sheeny black eyeshadow to bring out the hunger in her eyes. In half an hour she’d have to pick up Tiffany at nursery school, drop off the dog at the veterinarian’s, take Sonny’s shirts to the cleaner’s, buy a pound and a half of thresher shark, cilantro, and flour tortillas at the market, and start the burritos for supper. But now, she was stretching.

  She took a deep drag on the cigarette, tugged at her right foot, and brought it up snug against her buttocks. After a moment she released it and drew back her left foot in its place. One palm flat on the floor, her head bobbing vaguely to the beat of the music, she did half a dozen repetitions, then paused to relight her cigarette. It wasn’t until she turned over to do her straigh
t-leg lifts that she noticed the dampness in the rug.

  Puzzled, she rose to her knees and reached behind her to rub at the twin wet spots on the seat of her sweats. She lifted the corner of the rug, suspecting the dog, but there was no odor of urine. Looking closer, she saw that the concrete floor was a shade darker beneath the rug, as if it were bleeding moisture as it sometimes did in the winter. But this wasn’t winter, this was high summer in Los Angeles and it hadn’t rained for months. Cursing Sonny—he’d promised her ceramic tile and though she’d run all over town to get the best price on a nice Italian floral pattern, he still hadn’t found the time to go look at it—she shot back the sliding door and stepped into the yard to investigate.

  Immediately, she felt the Bermuda grass squelch beneath the soles of her aerobic shoes. She hadn’t taken three strides—the sun in her face, Queenie yapping frantically from the fenced-in pool area—and her feet were wet. Had Sonny left the hose running? Or Tiffany? She slogged across the lawn, the pastel Reeboks spattered with wet, and checked the hose. It was innocently coiled on its tender, the tap firmly shut. Queenie’s yapping went up an octave. The heat—it must have been ninety-five, a hundred—made her feel faint. She gazed up into the cloudless sky, then bent to check each of the sprinklers in succession.

  She was poking around in the welter of bushes along the fence, looking for an errant sprinkler, when she thought of the old lady next door—Muriel, wasn’t that her name? What with her husband dying and all, maybe she’d left the hose running and forgotten all about it. Meg rose on her tiptoes to peer over the redwood fence that separated her yard from the neighbors’ and found herself looking into a glistening, sunstruck garden, with banks of Impatiens, bird of paradise, oleander, and loquat, roses in half a dozen shades. The sprinklers were on and the hose was running. For a long moment Meg stood there, mesmerized by the play of light through the drifting fans of water; she was wondering what it would be like to be old, thinking of how it would be if Sonny died and Tiffany were grown up and gone. She’d probably forget to turn off the sprinklers too.