by T. C. Boyle
“They’ve got to be kept cool,” Grady insisted.
“What about us?” his mother would say. “We can’t afford to run the air-conditioning in the house—you jump down my throat every time I switch it on as if it was some kind of crime—but god forbid your precious rodents should do without it.”
“You’ve got to have patience, Gloria. Any business—”
“Business? You call sitting around in an air-conditioned shed all day a business? How many coats have you made, tell me that? How many pelts have you sold? How many have you even harvested? Tell me that.”
Dill was on Grady’s side and he never even thought twice about it. His mother didn’t know anything. Chinchillas were from South America, high in the Andes Mountains where the temperature was in the cool range and never went over eighty degrees, not even on the hottest day in history. At eighty degrees they’d die of heatstroke. She didn’t know that. Or she didn’t care. But Dill knew it. And he knew how to feed them their chinchilla pellets and the little cubes of hay, but no cabbage or corn or lettuce because it would give them gas and they would bloat up and die. He knew how to kill them too. Grady showed him. What you did was pull the chinchilla out of its cage by the tail and then take hold of its head in one hand and give the back legs a jerk to break the neck. Then it twitched for a while. Then you skinned it out. Grady didn’t like to kill them—they were cute, they were harmless, he didn’t like to kill anything—but it was a business and you had to keep sight of that.
That fall, the Santa Ana winds had begun to blow. Dill’s science teacher, Mr. Shields, had explained it to them—how, when a high-pressure system built up inland and low pressure settled in over the ocean, all the air got sucked down from the deserts and squeezed through the canyons in gusts of wind that were clocked at as much as a hundred miles an hour, drying everything to the bone—but Dill knew the wind as something more immediate. He felt it in the grit between his teeth, the ring of dirt in his nostrils in the morning. And he could taste it when he was out in the backyard, the whole world baking like the pizza ovens at Giovanni’s, only instead of pizza it was sage they were baking, it was the leaves from the sycamore trees along the dried-up streambed and the oil of the poison oak that was everywhere. He came home from school one afternoon and the wind was so strong it shook the bus when he stepped off it. Immediately a fistful of sand raked his face just as if it had been blasted out of a shotgun, and somebody—Billy Bottoms, most likely—shouted “Sucker!” as the doors wheezed shut.
He turned his head to keep the dirt out of his eyes. Tumbleweeds catapulted across the yard. Scraps of paper and plastic bottles spewed from the trash can in a discontinuous stream, like water blown out of a sprinkler, and he could already hear his mother going on about how somebody had been too lazy and too careless to take one extra second to fasten the raccoon clamps on the lid. He pulled down the brim of his cap, the one Grady had given him, with the silver-and-black F-14 Tomcat on the crown, hiked up his backpack to get the weight off his spine, and went on up the walk and into the house.
In the kitchen, he poured himself a tall glass of root beer and drank it down in a gulp, never so thirsty in his life, then poured another one and took his time with it while his Hot Pocket sizzled in the microwave. He was planning on going out to the shed to see what Grady was doing, but first he flicked on the TV in the kitchen just to have something to do while he was eating, and there was nothing but news on. The news was on because everything was burning everywhere, from Malibu through the San Fernando Valley and into L.A. and Orange County too. On every channel there was a woman with a microphone and some seriously blowing hair standing in front of a burning house and trees gone up like candles—change the channel and all you did was change the color of the woman, blond, black, Mexican, Chinese. Mr. Shields had told them a wildfire could come at you faster than you could run and that was why firemen sometimes burned to death and homeowners too—which was why you had to evacuate when the police came round and told you to. But nobody believed him. How could fire go faster than somebody running all out? He thought of Daylon James, the fastest kid in the school—how nobody could even touch him in flag football, let alone swipe the flag—and the idea seemed preposterous. But there were helicopters on the screen now, the camera jumping from one angle to another, and then just the flames, sheets of them rippling from red to orange to yellow and back, and the black crown of the smoke.
He was picturing himself running as hard as he could through a field of burning bushes and trees as a whole mountain of fire came down on him, and he must have zoned out a minute because when he looked up the TV screen was blank and the LED display on the microwave had switched off. That was when Grady burst through the back door. “Quick,” he said, and he was panting as if he couldn’t catch his breath and his face wasn’t Grady’s face but the face of some crazy person in a horror flick in the instant before the monster catches up to him. “Grab all the ice you can. Quick! Quick!”
They ran out the back door with every scrap of ice from the ice maker in two black plastic bags and the bags rippled and sang with the wind and the dirt blew in their eyes and the door to the shed didn’t want to open and when it did it tore back and slammed against the bleached-out boards like a giant fist. The shed was still cool inside, but the air-conditioning was down—the power was out, through the whole canyon—and already the chinchillas were looking stressed. He and Grady went down all four rows of cages, cages stacked three high with newspapers spread out on top of each row to catch the turds from the cages above, tossing ice cubes inside. Half an hour later, it was up to seventy-eight in the shed and Grady, his eyes jumping in his face like two yellow jackets on a piece of meat, said, “I’m going to make a run down the canyon for ice. You stay here and, I don’t know, take off your shirt and fan them, anything to work up some breeze, and maybe run the hose over the roof and the walls, you know? Just to cool it a little. All we need is a little till the sun goes down and we’ll be all right.”
But they weren’t all right. Even though Grady came back with the trunk of the Camry packed full of ice, thirty bags or more, and they filled the cages with the little blue-white machine-made cubes and draped wet sheets over everything, the heat kept rising. Till it was too hot. Till the chinchillas got heatstroke, one after another. First the standard grays started to die, then the mosaics and the black velvets that were worth twice as much. Grady kept reviving them with ice packs he squeezed around their heads till they came to and wobbled across their cages, but the electricity didn’t come back on and the ice melted and the sun didn’t seem to want to go down that day because it was a sci-fi sun, big and fat and red, and it wanted only to dry out everything in creation. By the time Dill’s mother got back from school—“Sorry I’m late; the meeting just dragged on and on”—the chinchillas were dead, all dead, two hundred and seventeen of them. And the shed smelled the way it still smelled now. Like piss. And shit. And death.
—
It was a thing they did on Fridays, after work, he and some of his colleagues who tracked CloudSat, the satellite that collected data on global cloud formations for the benefit of meteorologists worldwide, not to mention the local weatherman. They met at a sushi bar in Pasadena, one of those novelty places for gaijin featuring a long oval bar with the chefs in the middle and a flotilla of little wooden boats circling around in a canal of fresh-flowing water from which you plucked one plate or another from the passing boats till the saucers mounted up and the Filipino busboy slid them into his wet plastic tub. It wasn’t authentic. And it wasn’t good, or not particularly. But you could special-order if you liked (which he always did, depending on what the head chef told him was best that day), and, of course, the beer and sake never stopped coming. Sanjuro had already put away two sakes and he was thinking about ordering a beer—or splitting one with Colin, because he was going to have to switch to tea eventually, to straighten himself out for the drive home. He gazed absently down the bar, p
ast his co-workers and the mob of other people crowding in to ply their chopsticks and drip cheap sake into their little ceramic cups as if it were some exotic rite, and saw how the sun took the color out of everything beyond the windows. The cars were white with it, the trees black. What was he doing here?
Colin turned to him then and said, “Isn’t that right, Sange?”
They’d been discussing sports, the usual topic, before they moved on to women, and, inevitably, work. Sanjuro hated sports. And he hated to be called Sange. But he liked Colin and Dick Wurzengreist and Bill Chen, good fellows all, and he liked being here with them, even if he was feeling the effects of the sake on a mostly empty stomach—or maybe because he was. “What?” he heard himself say. “Isn’t what right?”
Colin’s face hung there above half a dozen saucers smeared with soya and a bottle of Asahi with a quarter inch of beer left in it. He was grinning. His eyes looked blunted. “SC,” he said. “They’re thirty-five-point favorites over Stanford, can you believe it? I mean, how clueless do you have to be not to bet against the spread—am I right?”
There was something like merriment in the drawn-down slits of Dick Wurzengreist’s eyes—Dick was drunk—but Bill Chen was involved in a conversation about alternate-side-of-the-street parking with the woman seated beside him and everyone knew the question was for show only, part of a long-standing joke at Sanjuro’s expense. They were all what the average person would call nerds, but it seemed that Sanjuro was the prince of the nerds simply because he didn’t care two pennies for sports. “Yes,” he said, and he wanted to flash a smile but couldn’t seem to summon the energy, “you’re absolutely right.”
Everyone had a laugh over that, and he didn’t mind—it was part of the routine—and then the beer came and things quieted down and Colin began to talk about work. Or not work, so much as gossip revolving around work, how so-and-so kept a bottle in his desk and how another had tested positive for marijuana and then slammed into a deer right out front of the gate, that sort of thing. Sanjuro listened in silence. He was a good listener. But he was bored with gossip and shoptalk too, and when Colin paused to top off both their glasses, he said, “You know that kid I was telling you about? The one that called me a gook?”
“A gook motherfucker,” Colin corrected.
“Well, you know how the wind’s been blowing, especially in the canyon—and I told you how the mother sends the kid out there every night to start up the grill?”
Colin nodded. His eyes were like the lenses of a camera, the pupils narrowing and then dilating: click. He was drunk. He’d have to call his wife to drive him home again, Sanjuro could see that. And he himself would soon have to push the beer aside and gear himself up for the freeway.
“You know it’s been gasoline all week, as if they couldn’t afford charcoal lighter, and I tell you last night he nearly blew the thing up.”
Colin let out a short bark of a laugh before he seemed to realize that it wasn’t funny, that Sanjuro hadn’t meant to be funny, not at all—that he was worried, deeply concerned, nearly hysterical over it and right on the verge of calling the police. Or the fire department, Sanjuro was thinking. The fire marshal. Wasn’t there a fire marshal?
“And there was a rat in it, in the grill, and he set the rat on fire.”
“A rat? You’re joking, right?”
“No joke. The rat was like this flaming ball shooting across the driveway and right on into the weeds behind the garage.”
“No,” Colin said, because that was the required response. And then he grinned: “Let me guess,” he said. “Then the weeds caught fire.”
Sanjuro felt weary suddenly, as if an invisible force, cupped to fit round his back and his shoulders and arms like a custom-made suit, were pressing down on him with a weight he couldn’t sustain. He was living at the top of a canyon, far from the city, in a high-risk area, because of Setsuko, because Setsuko was afraid of Americans, black Americans, Mexicans, whites too—all the people crowding the streets of Pasadena and Altadena and everyplace else. She watched the TV news, trying to learn the language, and it made her crazy. “I won’t live in an apartment,” she’d insisted. “I won’t live with that kind of people. I want nature. I want to live where it’s safe.” She’d sacrificed for him in coming here, to this country, for his career, and so he’d sacrificed for her and they bought the house at the end of the road at the very top of a wild canyon and tried to make it just like a house in Mitaka or Okutama.
He paused to give Colin a long look, staring into the weed-green shutters of his eyes—Colin, his friend, his amigo, the man who understood him best of anyone on the team—and he let out a sigh that was deeper and moister and more self-pitying than he’d intended, because he never showed emotion, or never meant to. That wasn’t the Japanese way. He looked down. Made his face conform. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s just what happened.”
—
So tonight it was chicken—and three of those hot Italian sausages he liked, and a piece of fish, salmon with the skin still on it his mother had paid twelve dollars for because they were having a guest for dinner. One of the teachers who worked with her at the elementary school. “His name’s Scott,” she said. “He’s a vegetarian.”
It took him a moment to register the information: guest for dinner, teacher, vegetarian. “So what does he eat—spinach? Brussels sprouts? Bean burritos?”
She was busy at the stove. Her wine glass stood half-full on the baked enamel surface between the snow peas sautéing in the pan and the pot where she was boiling potatoes for her homemade potato salad. He could see the smudge of her lipstick on the near side of the glass and he could see through it to the broken clock set in its display above the burners and the shining chrome-framed window on the door of the oven that didn’t work anymore because the handle had broken off and there was no way to turn it on, even with a pair of pliers. “Fish,” she said, swiveling to give him a look over her shoulder, “he eats fish.”
She’d come straight home from school that afternoon, showered, changed her clothes and run the vacuum over the rug in the living room. Then she’d set the table and stuck an empty vase in the middle of it—“He’ll bring flowers, you wait and see: that’s the kind of person he is, very thoughtful”—and then she’d started chopping things up for a green salad and rinsing the potatoes. Dill was afraid she was going to add, “You’re really going to like him,” but she didn’t and so he didn’t say anything either, though after the fish comment he’d thought about pitching his voice into the range of sarcasm and asking, “So is this a date?”
Her last words to him as he slammed out the door with the platter of meat, the matches and the plastic squeeze bottle of lighter fluid that had appeared magically on the doorstep that morning, were, “Don’t burn the fish. And don’t overcook it either.”
He was in the yard. The wind had died, but now it came up again, rattling things, chasing leaves across the driveway and up against the piece-of-shit Toyota, where they gathered with yesterday’s leaves and the leaves from last week and the week before that. For a long moment he just stood there, halfway to the grill, feeling the wind, smelling it, watching the way the sun pushed through the air one layer after another and the big bald rock at the top of the canyon seemed to ripple and come clear again. Then he went to the grill, set down the platter of chicken and sausage and the fat red oblong slab of fish, and lifted the heavy iron lid, half-hoping there’d be another rat in there—or a snake, a snake would be even better. But of course there was nothing inside. It was just a grill, not a rat condo. Ash, that was all that was there, just ash.
The wind jumped over the garage then and the ash came to life, sifting out like the sand in The Mummy Returns, and that was cool and he let it happen because here was the grill, cleaning itself. And while that was happening and the meat sat there on its platter and the plastic container squeezed in and out like a cold nipple in his hand, he was back in
school, last spring, and Billy Bottoms, who wasn’t scared of anybody or ever showed any weakness or even a flaw—not a single zit, nothing—had a black thumbprint right in the middle of his forehead. It was an amazing thing, as if Billy had turned Hindu overnight, and Dill couldn’t resist calling him out on it. Or no, he didn’t call him out on it. He came up behind him and wrestled one arm around his neck, and before Billy knew what was happening Dill had touched his own thumb to the mark there and his thumb came away black. Billy punched him in the side of the head and he punched back and they both got sent to the office and his mother had to come pick him up after detention because there was no late bus and it was your hard luck—part of your punishment—to have to have your mother come for you. Or your father.
Her face was set. She didn’t ask, not right away. She was trying to be understanding, trying to make small talk so as not to start in on him before they could both have a minute to calm themselves, so he just came out and said, “He had this spot of ash on his forehead. Like a Hindu, like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I wanted to see what it was, that was all.”
“So? A lot of kids in my class had it too. It’s Ash Wednesday.” She gave him a glance over the steering wheel. “They’re Catholic. It’s a Catholic thing.”
