by T. C. Boyle
The cats? That’s where it got sticky, really sticky. You see, nobody really lost any sleep over a pile of dead lizards—though we did the tests routinely and the tests confirmed what we’d expected, that is, the product had been concentrated in the geckos because of the sheer number of contaminated flies they consumed. But lizards are one thing and cats are another. These people really have an affection for their cats—no house, no hut, no matter how primitive, is without at least a couple of them. Mangy-looking things, long-legged and scrawny, maybe, not at all the sort of animal you’d see here, but there it was: they loved their cats. Because the cats were functional, you understand—without them, the place would have been swimming in rodents inside of a week.
You’re right there, Senator, yes—that’s exactly what happened.
You see, the cats had a field day with these feeble geckos—you can imagine, if any of you have ever owned a cat, the kind of joy these animals must have experienced to see their nemesis, this ultra-quick lizard, and it’s just barely creeping across the floor like a bug. Well, to make a long story short, the cats ate up every dead and dying gecko in the country, from snout to tail, and then the cats began to die…which to my mind would have been no great loss if it wasn’t for the rats. Suddenly there were rats everywhere—you couldn’t drive down the street without running over half-a-dozen of them at a time. They fouled the grain supplies, fell in the wells and died, bit infants as they slept in their cradles. But that wasn’t the worst, not by a long shot. No, things really went down the tube after that. Within the month we were getting scattered reports of bubonic plague, and of course we tracked them all down and made sure the people got a round of treatment with antibiotics, but still we lost a few and the rats kept coming….
It was my plan, yes. I was brainstorming one night, rats scuttling all over the trailer like something out of a cheap horror film, the villagers in a panic over the threat of the plague and the stream of nonstop hysterical reports from the interior—people were turning black, swelling up and bursting, that sort of thing—well, as I say, I came up with a plan, a stopgap, not perfect, not cheap; but at this juncture, I’m sure you’ll agree, something had to be implemented.
We wound up going as far as Australia for some of the cats, cleaning out the SPCA facilities and what-have-you, though we rounded most of them up in Indonesia and Singapore—approximately fourteen thousand in all. And yes, it cost us—cost us upfront purchase money and aircraft fuel and pilots’ overtime and all the rest of it—but we really felt there was no alternative. It was like all nature had turned against us.
And yet still, all things considered, we made a lot of friends for the U.S.A. the day we dropped those cats, and you should have seen them, gentlemen, the little parachutes and harnesses we’d tricked up, fourteen thousand of them, cats in every color of the rainbow, cats with one ear, no ears, half a tail, three-legged cats, cats that could have taken pride of show in Springfield, Massachusetts, and all of them twirling down out of the sky like great big oversized snowflakes….
It was something. It was really something.
Of course, you’ve all seen the reports. There were other factors we hadn’t counted on, adverse conditions in the paddies and manioc fields—we don’t to this day know what predatory species were inadvertently killed off by the initial sprayings, it’s just a mystery—but the weevils and whatnot took a pretty heavy toll on the crops that year, and by the time we dropped the cats, well, the people were pretty hungry, and I suppose it was inevitable that we lost a good proportion of them right then and there. But we’ve got a CARE program going there now, and something hit the rat population—we still don’t know what, a virus, we think—and the geckos, they tell me, are making a comeback.
So what I’m saying is, it could be worse, and to every cloud a silver lining, wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?
LITTLE AMERICA
ALL HE WANTED was a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar maybe. The guy was a soft touch, absolutely—the softest. You could see it in the way he clutched the suitcase with his big-knuckled hairy old hands and kept blinking his eyes as if he’d just got out of bed or something. People were spilling out of the train, the usual crush—a scrawny black woman with the pale splash of a birthmark on her face and two angry-looking kids clinging to her dress, a tight little clump of pin-eared teenagers, guys with briefcases and haircuts hustling up the ramp with their chop-chop strides—and nobody had spotted the old man yet. Roger stood motionless, twenty feet from him, and waited. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rohlich holding out his battered Orioles cap to a polyester wonder with sunglasses like a visor, and he saw the look of annoyance, the firm set of the jaw, the brush-off. Rohlich’s voice came back to him like a bad radio over the squeal of the train’s brakes and the scrape and clatter of shoes on the pavement and all the birdy jabber of the arriving and departing: “Hey, who bit you in the ass, man? All I wanted was a quarter—”
But the old man, the softest of touches, never moved. He stood rooted to the floor, just in front of the Baltimore sign, his watery old eyes roving over the crowd as if he was an explorer and he’d just discovered a new tribe. The man was old, Roger could see that, seventy at least, and he didn’t have a clue as to where he was. Ducking his head and sidling across the floor with the crab walk he always used on touches—never come up to them directly, never freak them—Roger moved in. He was moistening his lips to make his pitch and thinking, A buck, a buck at least, when the old man’s face suddenly lit with a smile. Roger looked over his shoulder. There was no one there. The old man was smiling at him.
“Hey,” Roger crooned, ducking his head again and rolling it back up on his shoulders, “hello. I mean, how you doin’?”
He was wearing a suit, the old man, and nothing too shabby, either—probably mohair or something like that—and his hair was perfectly parted, a plumb line that showed a swath of naked pink scalp beneath. The skin was drawn tight under his cheekbones and there was something strange about his lips, but the milky eyes were focused now. On Roger. “Well, well,” the old man said, and his voice was deep and hearty, with an echo to it, “good to see you again, a real pleasure.” And he reached out his hand for a shake.
Roger took the hand, a dry old-man’s hand, held it a moment and looked into his eyes. “Yeah, sure. Good to see you too.” He’d begun to wonder if the guy was mental or whatever—he was probably looking for his nurse. Or his keeper. But that watch—that was a Movado, three hundred bucks, easy—and he had a college ring that looked like something. “Real good,” Roger added, for emphasis.
“Yes,” the old man said, and he smacked his lips and held the suitcase out for Roger to take. Roger could feel his heart going. This was too good to be true, a fantasy in three dimensions and Technicolor, too. He looked over his shoulder, scanned the place for cops and took the suitcase. “We’ll be at the Sheraton again, then?” the old man asked.
Roger took a deep breath, his eyes uncontainable, a whole hive of bees buzzing round inside his chest—Just get us out of here—and said, “Yeah, the Sheraton. Of course. Just like last time, right?”
The old man tugged at his nose as if he was afraid it might drop off his face. He was studying his shoes. “Just like last time,” he repeated.
One more look around, and then Roger hunched his shoulders over the suitcase and swung toward the street exit. “Follow me,” he said.
The train always brought back memories—there was a rhythm to it, a discontinuous flow that seemed to peel back the layers of his mind like growth rings in a tree. One minute he was a boy hunched over the radio with his mother as his father’s voice spoke to the whole U.S.A. from out of the clasp of the impermeable dark, and then he was a father himself, his step light on the cobbles of Beacon Hill, and then a grandfather, and finally an old man on a train, staring back at himself in the flicker of the window. The train did that to him. It was like a drug, a narcotic, a memory solution leaking drop by drop into his uncertain veins. And that was funny, t
oo: he was on a train because he didn’t like to fly. Richard Evelyn Byrd III, son of the greatest aviator of them all, and he didn’t like to fly. Well, he was old now—he’d had enough of flying when he was a boy. A young man, really. He remembered the bright flaring skin of Antarctica, the whole ice shelf shaved close with a razor, felt the jolt of the landing and the hard sharp crack of the skis on the ice just as vividly as if they were beneath him now, saw again the light in his father’s eyes and the perfect sangfroid with which he confronted all things, the best and the worst alike.
Leverett had put him on the train in Boston and his daughter-in-law was waiting for him in Washington. He repeated it to himself, aloud, as the car swayed and clicked over the rails. Leverett. His daughter-in-law. Washington. But no, that wasn’t right. It was that pleasant young man from the Geographic Society, the one who’d been so nice about the rooms at the Sheraton, he was the one. Of course he was. A first-class reception all the way. And that was only as it should be—he, the son of the father, traveling all the way to the nation’s capital for the unveiling of the new commemorative stamp honoring the man whose legend would never die, the last of the men in the old mold, the last hero. Yes. And he would talk to them about that—to Walter what’s-his-name at the Geographic Society—about his father’s museum. He had a reindeer-skin mukluk with him now, in his suitcase, from the 1929 expedition—just to show it to them, just as bait. There was a whole houseful of stuff back in Boston, a shrine, and it was a shame it wasn’t on public display, now and permanently—and why not? For lack of a few dollars? They were financing presidents’ libraries, weren’t they? And paying out welfare and food stamps and whatnot? What would the Byrd Museum take? A million? Two? Well, he had his father’s mukluk for them and that was worth a thousand words of pleading and haggling—ten thousand.
And then the train stopped—he felt it lurch at his insides and for an instant he thought he was up in the hard pellucid Antarctic sky all over again, and he even felt the chill of it. But the train stopped, and there was his suitcase, and he got off. Washington, D.C. The capital. He recognized the station, of course he did. But where was his daughter-in-law? Where was the car? Where was that pleasant young fellow from the Geographic Society?
The old man’s voice kept nagging at him, a fruity drone that caught and swallowed itself and vomited it all back up again. Why weren’t they taking the car? Were they going to walk the whole way? And his daughter-in-law, where was she? But then he’d change the subject as if he wasn’t even listening to himself and the next minute he’d be rattling on about what a bracing day it was, just like high summer at the South Pole, ha ha ha, and now he was laughing or choking—it was hard to say which. Roger stayed two paces ahead of him, head down, fingers locked around the handle of the suitcase, and listened to him bluster and wheeze. “It’s not much farther,” he said. “You’ll see your daughter-in-law, she’ll be there, and everybody else, too. Here, this way,” he said, and he paused to let the old man draw even with him, and then he steered him down the alley out back of the recycling center.
They were six blocks from the station now, and the throttle of Roger’s heart had eased back a bit, but still, with every step he had to fight down the impulse to take the suitcase and run. That would have been the easy way. But he would have been a fool to do it and he knew the game was going to be a whole lot richer if he played it right. If he could just get the old geek into the back of the warehouse, a quiet place he knew, where the newspapers were stacked up twenty feet high, he could dig a little deeper. What else did he have besides the watch and ring? A wallet maybe? Cash? Credit cards?
At the door to the place—a big aluminum garage door that was pried up in the corner just enough to allow a no-waist man holding his breath to slip right on through—the old guy surprised him. He didn’t balk at all. Just took a glance at the trash blown up against the concrete-block wall as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, pinched in his gut and followed Roger into the dark echoing vastness of the warehouse.
And that was it: they were safe. It was over. Anything the old man had was Roger’s, right on down to his undershorts, and there was nobody to say any different. Roger led him behind a column of newsprint and set the suitcase down. “Here we are,” he said, turning to face the old man, “the Sheraton.”
“This isn’t the Sheraton,” the old man said, but he didn’t seem upset at all. He was grinning and his eyes were bright. “It isn’t the Ritz-Carlton, either. You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”
Roger gave him back the grin. There was a long pause, during which he became aware of the distant beep-beep-beep of a forklift somewhere on the far side of the warehouse. “Yeah, sure,” Roger said finally, “I was only joking, sure I was. Can’t fool you, huh?” He settled himself down on a stack of newspaper and motioned for the old man to do the same. He lit a cigarette—or the stub of a cigarette he’d picked out of an ashtray at the station. He was taking his time, enjoying himself—there was no reason to rush, or to get violent, either. The old man was out there, no doubt about it.
“So what’s in the suitcase?” Roger asked casually, shaking out the match and exhaling through his nostrils.
The old guy had been sitting there, as content as if he was stretched out in his easy chair back at home, smacking his lips and chuckling softly to himself, but now his face went serious. “My father’s mukluk.”
Roger couldn’t help himself. He let out a laugh. “Your father’s who?”
“Here, let me show you,” the old man said, and Roger let him take the suitcase. He propped it up on his bony old knees, popped the latches and pulled back the lid to reveal a nest of garments—socks, shirts, handkerchiefs and a tweed sportcoat. Rummaging around a moment, he finally came up with what he was looking for—some kind of shoe or boot or something, made out of fur—and held it up for Roger’s inspection as if it was the Hope diamond.
“So what did you say this was?” Roger asked, taking the thing from him and turning it over in his hand.
“My father’s mukluk. For the museum.”
Roger didn’t know what to make of this. He pulled quietly on his cigarette a moment, then handed the thing back to him with a shrug. “Is it worth anything?”
“Ha!” the old man boomed, and Roger was afraid he was going to get to his feet and try something. “Worth anything? The very mukluk Admiral Byrd wore in Little America? The very one?” The old man drew himself up, cradling the shoe to his chest. “And I tell you something—and you can tell Walter from me,” he said, lowering his voice in confidentiality, “I’ve got plenty more where this came from. Plenty. Notebooks, parkas, reindeer pants and finnesko boots, the sun compass itself—the very one he used to make his fix on the Pole.” He rocked back on his haunches. “Yes,” he murmured, and he might have been talking to himself, so oblivious was he of Roger and his surroundings, “you tell Walter. All we need is maybe a million. And that’s nothing these days. Nothing.”
The old man was as crazy as plant life, but that only took you so far, and though Roger had nowhere to go—hadn’t had anywhere to go in maybe ten years now—he was getting impatient. “You’re absolutely right,” he said, cutting him off in the middle of a windy speech about his museum, and he used the phrase as an excuse to lean forward and shake the dry old hand again. But this time, unlike the first, when every eye in the station was on them, Roger expertly slipped the watch over the bony wrist and dropped it in his coat pocket, and the old man didn’t know a thing about it.
Or maybe he did. His expression changed suddenly, as if he was trying to remember something. The lines stood out in his face. He looked old. Old and constipated. “I’m thirsty,” he suddenly announced.
“Thirsty?” Roger roared, drunk with his own success. “Hell, so am I—what say we share a pint or two, eh? Have a party. Drink to your mukluk and your museum.” He stood and patted his pockets theatrically, enjoying himself all over again—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun.
“But I’m a little short. You got any cash? For a drink, I mean?”
Another facial change. The jaw clenched, the eyes caught hold of him. “You’re not the young man from the Geographic Society,” the old man said quietly.
“The hell I’m not,” Roger protested, and he was so frisky all of a sudden he spun around twice and threw out his arms like a tap dancer rising to the finale. “Sure I am, old man, sure I am—but listen, what did you say your name was?”
“Byrd. Richard Evelyn Bird. The third.”
Oh, the solemnity of it, the dignity. He might have been announcing the King of Arabia or something. Roger laughed out loud. “Bird, huh? Tweet-tweet. Bird the Third.” Then he let a hint of ugliness creep into his voice, and he stood over the old man now, no mistaking the posture: “I said, you got any cash for a drink, Bird the Third?”
The hand shook, the fingers fumbled in the jacket pocket, and there was the wallet, genuine calfskin, receptacle for the sort of notes and documents that separated people like the old man from Roger and Rohlich and all the other bleary-eyed, rotten-toothed bums and winos curled up on their sheets of cardboard across the city. In that moment, Roger almost felt sorry for the old retard—almost. But in the end, of course, he felt sorrier for himself, and in a quick swipe the wallet was his: five twenties, folded and joined with a paper clip; three ones; a return ticket, Washington to Boston. Photos: an old lady, a kid in a Little League outfit, some white-haired old duffer in a parka. And what was this, what was this? A Visa card, thin as a wafer, shiny as a pot of gold.
He was used to a cocktail before dinner—a Manhattan, generally, shaken, and with a twist instead of a cherry—and a good cabernet or pinot noir with his meal, but this was something he hadn’t experienced before, this was something new. The young man passed him the bottle—Gallo White Port, the label read, Alcohol 19% By Volume—and he took a long gulping swallow that left his chin wet and his stomach burning. He was thirsty, nearly parched, and the liquid—it was cold, it was wet—went down easily, and after the first drink he didn’t care what it was. When the bottle was gone, the young man produced another, and though he’d been hungry, though he hadn’t eaten anything except the egg-salad sandwich and the apple his son had given him at the Boston station, the hunger faded and he felt better and better as the evening wore on. He was telling the young man about pemmican, how it was the highest-energy food man had yet to devise and how many calories you had to replace daily just to stay alive at seventy-five below, when all at once he felt as lucid as he ever had. He caught himself up so suddenly he almost choked. This wasn’t the young man from the Geographic Society, not at all. There was the same fringe of patchy, youthful beard, the startled blue eyes and delicate raw skin, but the nose was all wrong and the mouth had a mean, hurtful look to it. And his clothes—they were in tatters, soaked through with the grease and leavings of the ages, reeking, an unforgivably human stink he could smell from all the way over here. “This isn’t Washington,” the old man said, understanding now that he’d gotten off at the wrong stop, that he was in some other city altogether, a place he didn’t know, understanding that he was lost. “Is it?”
