by T. C. Boyle
This was an old-fashioned grocery, dimly lit, kept cool by the thickness of its ancient walls and smelling strongly of the meats and cheeses in the refrigerated cases—provolone, with its potent smoky aroma, above all else. It was a pleasant smell, and as I carried my basket through the deserted aisles and made my selections, I began to feel at home, as if everything were going to work out as planned and the solution to all our problems was at hand. I selected the wine, found milk and butter in the cooler and a dry salami hanging from its string in the front window, added bread, cheese, olives, artichoke hearts. Once I’d concluded my business, I carried my basket up to the checkout counter, behind which waited a solitary woman in a stained white apron. We exchanged greetings, and as the woman rang up my purchases I couldn’t help inquiring if she knew of a reliable product for ant control. At first I thought she hadn’t heard me, but then she lifted her eyes to mine before dropping them again. “Signore,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper, “here we don’t talk of such things.”
“Don’t talk of such things?” I repeated incredulously. “What do you mean? I see that you carry several ant powders, including Anti-Ant, and I just wanted to ask if you find it effective. If it’s the best product, that is. And safe. Is it safe?”
She just shook her head, refusing to look up from the counter as she wrapped my things, then shifted her eyes furtively to my left and I saw that we were not alone. A man stood there beside me, not young, not old, wearing some sort of official uniform—matching trousers and shirt, which bore an insignia patch on one shoulder. He wore his hair long and slicked it back beneath an undersized cap in the same hue as his clothing and he was giving me a quizzical smile. “And you are—?” he asked, his voice a kind of rumble that rose on the interrogative.
I introduced myself and we shook hands.
“Ah, of course,” he said. “I should have known—you’re the new tenant of the Mauro place, am I correct?”
“Yes,” I said, “we just moved in—today, in fact. And I was just, well”—I shrugged by way of adducing the age-old relation between the sexes—“my wife sent me down here to the grocery to pick up a few things. For our first meal in the new house.” I shrugged again, as if to say, You know how it is.
“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” he said. “Would six be too early?”
I gave him a look of bewilderment. “I’m sorry,” I said. “And who are you, exactly?”
He straightened up then and perhaps I was imagining it but his heels seemed to click as if ready for action. “Forgive me,” he said, digging a card out of his shirt pocket and handing it to me. “Aldo Baudino,” he said with a bow. “Of the Argentine Ant Control Corporation.”
I wanted to question him further—Ant Control? Six a.m.?—but the woman behind the counter was shaking her head and jerking her eyes toward the door, trying to warn me off, trying to tell me something, but what? I thanked her, paid, bade them both farewell and went out the door sans further comment.
Arriving at home, just as I swung open the gate and started up the path, I was startled by a shriek that all but stopped my heart. I dropped my packages and broke into a run. At that moment the door flung back and Anina came down the steps with the baby clutched to her and I saw in an instant what had happened: the baby was dusted all over with the ant powder and there was a greenish crust of it round his mouth where he must have crawled across the floor to ingest it. “The doctor!” Anina cried. “We have to get him to the doctor!”
My heart was pounding and I felt nothing but guilt and horror: How could I have been so stupid? What were ants, a plague of ants, every ant in the world, compared to this? But where was the doctor and how would we find him? We didn’t have a phone—or we did, but it hadn’t been connected yet—and the only thing I could think of was the Reginaudos. They would know. Without a word—and here Anina must have thought I’d lost my mind—I veered right and sprang over the hedge into their yard, expecting to find them still seated at the table with their feet up, sipping Campari. They weren’t there. Ants boiled up around my feet and I saw then that a whole swift roiling river of them was heading for our house, as if the powder had attracted rather than repelled them. Anina shrieked again. And then I was pounding on the Reginaudos’ door, peering through the glass and shouting for help.
A moment later, Ugo appeared, looking annoyed—or perplexed, perhaps that’s a better word. “Yes?” he said, pulling back the upper half of the Dutch door to his kitchen. “What is it, what’s all the commotion?”
“The baby!” I could barely get the words out—and now, even as I noticed that Ugo was wearing a pair of rubber galoshes and that the concrete floor of the kitchen seemed to be glazed with half an inch or more of water, Anina was there beside me, jabbering excitedly and holding the baby out in evidence.
That was the tableau we presented, the four of us—and the ants, of course. The baby, for his part, seemed calm enough, grinning a broad greenish grin and clinging to his agitated mother as if nothing were amiss, as if ant poison were no more a concern than lime Jell-O and every bit as irresistible. Ugo waved a dismissive hand. “I see he’s been into the Ant-Away,” he said. “But not to worry, it’s nothing. No more harmful than sugar and water.”
My wife just stared at him, her eyes—her beautiful olive eyes—so swollen they looked as if they would burst. “What do you mean, it’s nothing? Can’t you see? He’s eaten ant poison!”
And here came Sylvana, still in her skimpy two-piece, sloshing barefoot across the floor. “I told you,” she called out, “—it’s harmless.”
But my wife wouldn’t be assuaged—and nor would I, though I was trying to make sense of this. Why would anyone market an ant powder that was harmless, unless it was harmless only to humans and fatal to the insects? But if that was the case, then why were there so many of them?
Finally, leaning over the frame of the door even as a single column of ants worked its way down along the wall to join the phalanx heading for our house, Sylvana said she’d call the doctor if we really insisted. “But he’ll do nothing, believe me. He’s seen it before, a hundred times. You want my advice? Give the kid a tablespoon or two of olive oil and let him bring it up.”
“No,” my wife said, shaking her head emphatically, and I realized, absurdly, that she hadn’t even been introduced yet. “The doctor.”
Both the Reginaudos exchanged a look and shrugged, and then Ugo sloshed across the kitchen to where the phone hung from the wall. I turned to my wife, ignoring the boots and the soaked floor and what they implied. “Anina,” I said, “this is our neighbor, Sylvana. Sylvana, my wife, Anina.”
The baby grinned and stuck a green finger in his mouth.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sylvana said, extending her hand.
The doctor came on foot, toting his bag up from the village below. He was a jaunty, bowlegged man of indeterminate age, though I figured him to be twice as old as I, if not more. “Ah, you must be the new people,” he exclaimed, pushing through the front gate as I came up the path to meet him, followed by an anxious Anina clutching the baby in her arms. “And this,” he said, slipping a pair of reading glasses over the bridge of his nose and bending to the baby, “must be the patient.” He held out his arms and Anina handed the baby over. The doctor hefted him, then clucked his tongue in the way of doctors everywhere—even specialists—and stated the obvious: “I see he’s been into the Ant-Away, eh?”
This was the signal for Anina to pour out her concerns to him, beginning with the story of awakening to find that the baby had crawled down from the bed and somehow managed to push open the screen door that someone had carelessly left ajar (and here she shot me a look), then segueing into the medical issues we’d had with the child over the past six months and ending with a long unnecessary coda about our trip down from the north and our surprise—shock, really—over finding the house infested with ants.
The doctor wasn’t really listening. He was shuffling his feet and whirling about wit
h the baby thrust high in his arms, cooing baby talk, as our son, giddy with the attention, peeled back his lips in a wide green smile and cried out his joy. It was then that I realized that all three of us were unconsciously shuffling about—motion the only thing to discourage the ants underfoot—and I found myself giving in to impatience. “But the baby,” I said, trying to get the doctor’s attention as he cooed and spun, “—is he all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” the doctor assured me, handing the baby back to Anina. “A little malathion never hurt anybody.” The birds were settling into the trees by this time and the sun sat low in the sky. My stomach rumbled. It had been a long day and still we hadn’t eaten. “And you, little mother,” the doctor said, focusing on Anina now, “feed him nothing but pastina for a day or two and examine his diaper carefully. If the result is in any way greenish, you must bring him to my offices; if not, forget the whole business and feel blessed because there isn’t a thing in the world wrong with this little fellow.” And here he leaned in to mug for the baby. “Isn’t that right, Tiger?”
“But aren’t you going to examine him?” My wife, usually so reserved with strangers, was in a state, I could see that. She’d practically attacked the Reginaudos and now here she was making demands of the doctor—and this was only our first day in town.
Shifting from foot to foot in a kind of autonomous tarantella, the doctor just grinned. “No need,” he assured her, “no need at all,” and already he was swinging round to go. “Just remember,” he called over his shoulder, “pastina and a close scrutiny of the diapers.”
Furious and muttering to herself—I distinctly heard her spit out the term quack—Anina spun round and stamped back up the path and into the house, murdering ants all the way, while I followed the doctor to the gate to see him out. “What about your fee?” I asked, pulling open the gate for him.
He seemed to shiver all over and he brusquely swiped one pantleg against the other. “No need to worry about it now,” he said, grinning and twitching as the sinking sun made a lantern of his deeply fissured face, “I’ll send a bill tomorrow.” He held out his hand and I took it. “Specialists,” he pronounced, and for an instant I thought he was going to spit in the dirt, but he merely squeezed my hand, swung his bony shoulders round, and headed back down the track to the village below.
It was then, just as I plucked the paper bags of groceries up off the ground, almost idly brushing the ants from them and thinking of dinner and a glass of wine—some surcease to all the turmoil of the day—that I heard a “Pssst-pssst” from the hedgerow that divided our southerly neighbor’s property from ours and turned to see a man beckoning to me from the shadows there. He was squat, big-bellied, with an enormous head and eyes that seemed to absorb all the remaining light till they glowed like headlamps.
He was known only as “the Captain,” he was a foreigner, from Mexico, and he’d formerly been enforcer for one of the narcotics gangs until he was shot three times in the abdomen and his wife, who’d been sitting beside him in their convertible where they were stopped at a red light, was killed by yet another bullet meant for him. Now he was retired and—according to the Reginaudos, who’d filled me in on the details and warned me against him (they called him an extremist)—he didn’t get out much. Which, I suppose, was only understandable.
I crossed to the hedge and offered him a “Buona sera,” but he didn’t return the greeting or bother with introductions. He merely said, “The Reginaudos? Don’t trust them. She’s a slut—and come to think of it, so is he. All they do is throw down their powders and lie around screwing all day.”
I lifted my eyebrows, though I wasn’t sure if he could read my expression in the fading light. I wasn’t especially happy—I didn’t want to hear criticism of my neighbors or get caught up in pitting one against the other, and the ants, naturally, had begun to discover me standing there with the bags of groceries in hand—but I was polite, polite to a fault. Or so Anina claimed.
“You want to know how to deal with this scourge? Huh? I mean, really deal with it, the final solution and none of this pussyfooting? Here, step over the hedge and I’ll show you.”
The Captain didn’t use powders or sprays. He used traps of his own devising. Baited wires suspended over coffee cans filled with gasoline, into which the ants, in their frenzy, would drop singly and sometimes by the dozen, as well as electrical connections timed to give a fierce jolt to a rotting fish head or scrap of stinking meat every thirty seconds. For the next half hour, though I wanted only to go home, sit down to dinner and devise some sort of plan to keep my own ants out of the bedroom for the course of a single night, this night when I was so exhausted I could barely make sense of what the Captain was saying in his vertiginous accent, I patiently followed him around and forced myself to make little noises of approbation over one device or another.
“This is the Argentine ant,” he said at one point, “and I don’t know if you quite comprehend what that means. They are invaders”—and here he paused to give me a sharkish grin—“like me. But they’re from the true south, in the Americas, in the jungle where you have to fight without quarter every minute of every day even to have a prayer of staying alive. They’ve outcompeted the native ants everywhere they wash up, destroyed them, devoured them. You know what these ants are like?”
I shook my head.
“Like the cells of your body, each ant a single cell and all working in concert, one thing, one living organism, and the queen is the brain. My plan is to starve her by taking her workers away from her in the way you cut up a corpse, piece by piece.” There was a silence broken only by the snap of electricity and the faint hiss of ants dropping into cans of gasoline. “Here,” he said, and he gestured toward one of his suspension traps, “take as many of these as you like—it’s your only hope.”
In the morning, at first light, after having spent an all-but-sleepless night at war with the ants (resorting finally to encircling the bed with a frangible wall of green powder, despite any fears for the baby), I was awakened by a noise in the garden. I arose, pulled on my slippers and went to investigate, crushing ants underfoot all the way across the bedroom, through the kitchen and out the back door. I saw a figure there, bent to the wall of the house, and though my mind wasn’t as clear as I would have liked, it took only a moment to identify him—the undersized cap, the slicked-back hair, the shoulder patch—as the Ant Man, come as promised. Or threatened, if you prefer. “Good morning,” I said, irritated and relieved at the same time—here was intrusion, here was hope.
He didn’t look up. “You have a problem,” he said. His voice rumbled like a tremor in the earth.
“A problem?” I said, throwing it back at him. “Isn’t that stating the obvious? Don’t we all, as you say, have a problem? My question is, what are you going to do about it?”
Down on one knee now, working the dirt with a trowel, he glanced over his shoulder and gave me a sardonic smile, as if to concede the point. “My intention,” he said, speaking slowly, his voice a rolling fervent peal, “is to eliminate that problem. Come. Look here.”
I bent closer.
“You see this?” I saw now that he had set a clay saucer in the depression he’d made in the soil where it came into contact with the wall of the house. There was something in the depths of the saucer, a thick amber substance that glistened in the early-morning light as if it were a precious gift. “This is my special formula—honey, yes, but laced with an insecticide so fast-acting and fatal that you’ll be ant-free here within the week. I guarantee it.”
“But what of the baby?” I said. “Won’t the baby—?”
He made a small noise in the back of his throat. “This is for ants, not babies,” he said. “If you’re so anxious, why not keep the infant inside—you can do that, can’t you? Don’t you think it’s worth the effort, considering the alternative? Wake up. This is the planet Earth we live on—and it has its terms and conditions like anything else.”
“Yes, but—”
I nodded.
He held me with his acerbic eyes, then nodded back, as if we were in agreement. “Do the math,” he said, and then he bent to set the next saucer in the ground.
A week went by. Several times during that week, and at the oddest hours—dawn, midnight—Signor Baudino appeared to refill his saucers, a secretive figure who became almost as much of an annoyance as the ants themselves, which, despite his promise, seemed even more abundant than ever. We slept little, though I finally resorted to setting the four posts of the bed in their own pomodoro cans of water, and that gave us a measure of relief, though Anina and I tossed and turned, dreaming inevitably that the swarms had overtaken us and gnawed us right down to our meatless bones. For the baby, even his waking hours were a kind of nightmare, the ants attacking him the moment we released him from his cradle, and when I look back on that period I have a vision of him itching himself, his former condition complicated now by a melding of the imaginary and the actual so that he could never be sure what he was feeling, just that it was a perpetual harrying of the flesh, and I felt powerless to console him. I see Anina too, growing more sullen and combative by the day and blaming me for all our problems, as if I had any control over this plague in our midst. The Reginaudos stopped by to offer advice and yet more powders and sprays, and the Captain, unbidden, twice slipped into the yard to set up his gasoline traps. For my part, I felt as harried as my wife and infant, trying gamely to pursue my work at a desk set in cans of water and scratching my equations across a page only to see them devolve into streams of ants that were as insubstantial as the ones crawling through my dreams.
