The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  He trailed off as he waddled from the center of our attention. He closed his robe at the waist and leaned himself against a young tree several feet away from the group.

  “Did you see his face?” said one of the boys. “Those pajamas?”

  “Classic,” said another. “The best one yet.”

  It was some time before the fire department came. If the building had indeed been burning, there wouldn’t have been much left to save. The firefighters looked exactly as I had imagined firefighters would look. They had large hats and yellow jackets. They were carrying axes. There was an enormous Dalmatian sitting on a bed in the back of the truck, and one firefighter approached the animal with water in a silver dish. They had the Headmaster give a brief statement and sign a form. He made us stand outside and witness all of it. It was not the coldest I’ve ever been, but it was still remarkably cold.

  The firefighters had arrived with sirens blaring, but they left with little fanfare. Just the brake lights burning and a few of the boys hollering after them to honk the horn once more. They didn’t.

  We filed back to our waterlogged quarters, and the Headmaster left for his home just down the hill. Some of the boys were still laughing. One was wiping his eyes while his friend with similar hair tried to entertain him, striking fierce poses like a dancer or a street performer. The mass of them moved down the hall like foam.

  I was a silent observer, trying not to be noticed or interacted with. Not one of these boys was to be trusted. They’d spent too many years on their own, too many years viewing themselves as separate from the rest of the world—separate but as a unit. One or several of these boys had pulled that alarm. One or several of these boys, perhaps the same one or several, or an entirely different one or several, had been outside my window, laughing and smoking and whispering to me just a moment before the water was released.

  I recalled then my threat to drown them. How soon after the water fell. I ground my nails into my palms, watching their faces and looking for signs of guilt. Who was watching me? Who was not watching me? I looked for anything at all, keeping to myself and trying to go unnoticed, until I was pushed from behind and fell face-first into the water.

  My chin struck the floor and the pain flared up, causing my eyes to water, tears to come pouring down my face. When my hands went to my jaw, something wet worked its way down my wrists, into the sleeves of my nightshirt. Boys filed past. None of them stopped. I would have felt invisible except that the group parted down the middle to move around me, and one or two boys pointed.

  “He’s soaked,” they said.

  You will die by my hand, I thought, though I was surprised to realize I felt that way, and a little frightened by it.

  I was startled then by a boy I didn’t know, who slid his hands into my armpits and helped me up. It was awkward and painful. My body was not ready to be lifted. I was not used to being touched, in general.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “You looked like you needed help,” he said.

  “It’s not bad,” I said, putting my hand to my chin again. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

  “I think that means it was a bad fall,” he said.

  “I was pushed,” I said.

  “By whom?” he said.

  “If I knew, I would be dealing with it,” I said.

  “How would you deal with it?” he said, grinning now.

  “That’s between me and the dead men,” I said, confident that anyone who could find something in my suffering to grin at was worthy of suspicion.

  “Very strong words,” he said.

  “Words and deeds,” I said.

  “You know,” he said, “people don’t like you.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Most people here,” he said, “don’t like you. You’ve made enemies.”

  “Then so have they,” I said. “Or one, anyway.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Are you an enemy?” I said, ready with a fist in each hand.

  It had been a long night.

  “No,” he said. “I never liked Fry.”

  “Who is Fry?” I said.

  “He used to sit behind you,” he said. “Before you showed up, he would hold my face to the shoe pile.”

  On wet days, we piled our shoes on a mat outside the dining hall. You could smell it through the windows, and it was a bleak bog where reptiles went to expire.

  “I didn’t do anything to Fry,” I said.

  “And yet he’s gone,” said the boy.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll leave it between the two of you, then.”

  “I’d like to make an appeal to the group,” I said. “I had nothing to do with whatever’s happened to Fry, and I’d like everyone to know.”

  “I’m not going to claim you didn’t do the right thing,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “You’ve saved yourself a lot of trouble, as Fry was only getting started with you. But just because I understand you doesn’t mean the others ever will.”

  “It isn’t fair,” I said. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Fair or not,” he said, still grinning, “you’ve cast your lot.”

  There was still water on the floor of my room in the morning. It came to just above my small toe, so I took my clothes from the dresser and dressed on my bed, where it was dry. I cuffed the pant legs, against instruction, and carried my shoes and socks into the hall. There was water there too, running the length of the corridor and into each boy’s room.

  The others were coming out of their rooms, splashing water with the edges of their feet or trying to figure out some way to dress without getting their socks and pants wet. One boy slid by on his belly, sending a spray through the open doors on either side of him. He made a high-pitched whooping sound as he went, like a war cry.

  The floor of the bathroom was also a puddle. I touched my chin and it still felt wet, so I grabbed a handful of toilet paper from the dispenser and carried it, along with my shoes, to the far end of the hall and out the door.

  Water rushed down the steps as I stepped out and over to a narrow stone path that led around the building to the yard. I walked barefoot along the cool stones until I reached the old gazebo. It was pale blue on the outside and decorated on the inside with cobwebs, wasps’ nests, desiccated moths, and a pulsing cluster of daddy longlegs. Overall, an improvement on the hall of unbridled children. I folded the toilet paper and held it to my chin until it stuck. The structural supports of the gazebo were weathered. The bricks that held its base were soft and crumbling, like chalk. I finished dressing and laced my shoes, watching the other boys pour damply from the hall. Still no Fry. Which meant there were now thirty of us altogether. Capacity, on the nose.

  At breakfast, I spotted the boy who’d helped me up the night before. He was at a table of six, three boys to each short bench. There might have been room for me if one or two of them were willing to scoot over, but not a single boy moved in either direction as I approached. The one who’d helped me the night before did not look up.

  I ate alone at a table full of boys I had not yet interacted with. I sat across from a skinny one who was having trouble keeping his glasses on his face. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose until they pressed into his brow, and when he drew his hand away they again sank slowly back down to the bulges of his nostrils.

  “Set them on your tray,” I said.

  “I can’t see without them on my face,” he said.

  “What’s there to see?” I said. “You’ve seen this room enough to last a lifetime, haven’t you?”

  “Why are you picking on me?” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m trying to help.”

  “Worry about yourself,” he said.

  The toilet paper on my chin was n
ow crisp and dry. “It’s there to cover the wound,” I said, touching it.

  His glasses slid again, this time failing to catch at his nostrils and finishing the job instead by sliding off and directly into the small square of his tray committed to beef stew.

  I took no pleasure in seeing him suffer. Or I took no pleasure in seeing him suffer until I realized I knew his face. Now that I was seeing it in full, now that I could focus on his face as it was, and not as it was when struggling with the glasses, I recognized him as the boy who sat in the row behind me in class, very near to where Fry used to sit. Close enough to have possibly inspired his loyalty to Fry, if only to keep out of the devilish boy’s crosshairs.

  “You sit behind me in class,” I said.

  “That was Fry,” he said.

  “But you sit by Fry,” I said.

  “I sat by Fry,” he said.

  “And you two are friends,” I said.

  “We were friends,” he said.

  “Where’s he gone to then?” I said. “What’s become of him?”

  “Like you don’t know what happened to Fry,” he said.

  “Why would I know what happened to Fry?” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Why would you know.”

  I had no appetite. I dumped my tray without saying anything more to the boy with soiled glasses, making note of his face as I left. In my head, I drew a picture. If he’d once joined forces with Fry simply to avoid Fry’s wrath, he was a weasel. He might not have been bloodthirsty enough to push me from behind in the hall, but he still wasn’t to be trusted. He might have been a voice outside my window. He might have pulled the alarm. Who knew where his loyalties, however ill-founded, would lead him, or what he was willing to do to save his own skin?

  I spent recess on the edge of the yard, watching the other boys chase one another and slap each other in the testicles. Civilized boys are barbaric in their play, and, to me, every single one of them seemed murderous.

  The laundry was done once a week, so I still had the fully folded paper from the Headmaster in my pocket. I stood there feeling equally murderous, waiting for the next step, thumbing the folded paper in my pocket for several minutes, before finally sliding it out and unfolding it with the intention of folding it up again to see if that would calm me down.

  If there’s something you’d like to confess, it read, any time is a good time to do so.

  I hadn’t noticed the message before, or it hadn’t been there. Both were possible, but neither seemed to matter now. If I was meant to confess in the Headmaster’s office, I’d failed, and if I was meant to confess now, in the middle of recess, I had no idea to whom I was to offer the confession. And what was there to confess? Fry and I might have harbored violent feelings for one another, albeit for different reasons, but he was the only one so far who’d acted on them. The only question that remained was: How many times could I cross the Headmaster before he turned resolutely against me? Or was it already too late?

  I folded the paper along the exact same lines as before, but my mood did not improve. I dug a small hole in the dirt of the yard with my toe and placed the folded paper there, smothering it with my heel.

  The other boys were pulling each other’s pants down and spitting into one another’s hair. All of them were screaming.

  Any fears I’d held of having upset the Headmaster were assuaged when, after recess, I was put on garden duty.

  The assignment, as unpleasant as it could be, was still one of the more preferable jobs, and it was celebrated as such. Receiving it clearly indicated that, though my standing with the other boys was worse than ever, the Headmaster remained on my side. His note might not have been an appeal to my conscience at all, but a private message between co-conspirators.

  It’s you and me versus the animals, it might well have said. Consider me a port in the approaching storm.

  The garden was nearly a quarter mile from the facility’s main building, a little less than halfway between our dormitory and the Headmaster’s home. It had once been used as part of the curriculum, or so I was told, but now the rows of tomato plants and lettuce were choked with weeds. Lumpy squash rotted on the vine. What was left of garden duty consisted mainly of dealing with the waste and decay. We were to weed what we could and collect the rotten fruit and vegetables for dumping elsewhere. Supposedly, when the garden was part of the curriculum, the boys feasted on the products of their labor at least once a week during high season. But now, at best, the plants yielded a handful of edible sundries, most of which hosted burrowing insects, worms and wasps and the like, revealed to us only if we were excited enough by the sight of something edible to transport it back to the kitchen and split it open.

  The other boy assigned to the garden was silent for most of the walk. I didn’t know him and was happy to keep my distance, provided he kept his. I carried the long tools, two rakes and a hoe, and had a trowel shoved into each pocket. He pushed a wheelbarrow full of fresh dirt. We were to weed, dump the dirt, and use the wheelbarrow to carry away

  the rotten produce. I imagined our skin would burn some in the sun.

  “If we’re going to spend the afternoon together, you could at least say something every now and then,” he said as the garden came into view.

  “I don’t have anything to say just yet,” I said.

  “It’s polite to come up with something,” he said, “when faced with a length of time alone with a stranger.”

  “Thank you then,” I said, “for taking that first step toward making this less awkward between us.”

  A few moments later, we’d arrived at the garden. I set the long tools and the trowels at its edge.

  “If you weed,” I said, “I’ll collect the rotten fruit.”

  This wasn’t agreeable to him, and he requested we play a quick hand game to settle the issue of our individual responsibilities. I didn’t know the rules, so he explained them to me.

  “Knuckles,” he said, “is about not being a pansy.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll hold my knuckles out,” he said, “and you hit them with your knuckles. Then we’ll switch. We go back and forth like that until one of us admits he’s a pansy and quits.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You have to actually say the words,” he said, “for the game to end.”

  “One of us does,” I said.

  He held out two fists, knuckles up. There was a blackbird holding in the air far above us. I could smell the garden on the wind.

  “I just bring my knuckles down onto yours?” I said.

  “Hard as you can,” he said. “And I will do the same.”

  I raised my fists and brought them down with as much force as I could manage. The garden dirt was soft, so I was clumsy in my footing. Our knuckles popped, and the pain of it was like five little picks piercing the joint of each finger. The other boy shook out his hands, sucking through his teeth. Then he made two fists, once again.

  I might have hit harder if we were on solid ground, I realized, but that was for my next turn. I made two fists, as he had, and already it hurt to bend my knuckles. He had set me up by allowing me to go first. The pain I would feel upon receiving my first blow would be enhanced by the blow I’d just delivered. Every step of the way, I would be one blow ahead. I saw the game unfolding over the next few minutes. Our knuckles splitting, one by one. A curve of dull bone showing through skin.

  The other boy was smiling, pleased at having tricked me. I let my wrists hang.

  “I’m a pansy,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” he said, opening his fists and examining his knuckles. “I’ll weed then,” he said, “and you can gather up the garbage fruit.”

  He called me Pansy as we worked.

  “Pumpkin here, Pansy,” he said. “Or something like it.”

  “Rabbit, Pansy,” he said. “Two days dead.
”

  I’ve never cared what people call me. I piled the rabbit on the pumpkin in the wheelbarrow. It was like a poem. Nicknames are like poems in that they are two of the least important things in the world. What use is there in talking about something in the language of what it is not?

  There was a fingerling potato sticking up out of the dirt, pink and clean. I gripped it with a fist and pulled hard to dislodge it from its roots. Not only did the potato hold its ground, but the unresolved force of my yank nearly toppled me. The potato was sticking out a little higher than before, but only slightly. I moved closer, trowel in hand. It wasn’t until I bent over to dig the thing out that I noticed part of it was coated with what looked like a shell. A pink surface with a little white sliver at its tip and a faint echo of that sliver down at the base, where the flesh of the pink potato began. I dug at the edges of the potato until it revealed itself.

  pornography

  I had seen several naked body parts belonging to a woman, but never a completely naked female body, until that sore-knuckled afternoon in the facility garden. She was only a few inches under the dirt, our teacher, whose name I should really have taken the time to learn, I realized, as we were wiping the mud from her eyes.

  The other boy kept saying “Oh no,” as if I needed to be reminded of how unpleasant it all was.

  I used the trowel to dig down and around the corpse, which wasn’t even stiff yet. She was heavy, but we could have easily lifted her out of the mud if the other boy had helped me.

  Instead, he said, “Oh no.”

  “How did she get here?” I said.

  “We have to hide her,” he said.

  “I don’t follow,” I said.