T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

His mother was a teacher. His father didn’t exist. His grandmother was dead. And this house, high in the canyon with bleached boulders all around it like the big toes of a hundred buried giants, was his grandmother’s house. And his piece-of-shit ’97

Toyota Camry with no front bumper, two seriously rearranged fenders and the sun-blistered paint that used to be metallic gold but had turned the color of a fresh dog turd, was his grandmother’s car.

But then she didn’t need a car, not where she was now. And where was that? he’d asked his mother in the hush of the back room at the funeral parlor where they’d burned up his grandmother and made her fit into a squared-off cardboard box. “You know,” his mother said. “You know where she is.” And he’d said, “Yeah, I know where she is — in that box right there.”

So he felt a little thrill. He had a can of gasoline in his hand. He was the man of the house—“You’re my man now,” his mother had told him when he was eleven years old and Grady’s face swelled up like a soccer ball from all the screaming and fuck-you’s and fuck-you-too’s before he slammed out the door and disappeared for good — and it was his job to light the fire and grill the meat. Every night. Even in winter when the rains came and it was cold and he had to wear his hoodie and watch the flames from under the overhang on the garage. That was all right. He had nothing better to do. And he liked the way the charcoal went up in a flash that sucked the life out of the air after he’d soaked it with gasoline, a thing his mother had expressly forbidden him to do (It could explode, you know that, don’t you?), but they were out of charcoal lighter and the store was way down the snaking road at the bottom of the canyon and for the past week this was the way he’d done it.

The grill was an old iron gas thing shaped like a question mark with the dot cut off the bottom. The tank was still attached, but it had been empty for years and they just dumped briquettes in on top of the chunks of ancient pumice that were like little burned-up asteroids sent down from space and went ahead and cooked that way. He set down the can, patted the front pocket of his jeans to feel the matches there. Then he lifted the iron lid and let it rest back on its hinges, and he was just bending to the bag of charcoal when he saw something move beneath the slats of the grill. He was startled, his first thought for the snakes coming down out of the chaparral because of the drought, but this was no snake — it was a rat. A stupid dun-colored little thing with a wet black eye and cat’s whiskers peering up at him from the gap between two slats, and what was it thinking? That it would be safe in a cooking grill? That it could build a nest in there? He slammed the lid down hard and heard the thing scrambling around in the ashes.

He could feel a quick pulse of excitement coming up in him. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his mother wasn’t watching through the screen door, and he snatched one quick look at the blank stucco wall and sun-glazed windows of the house next door — Itchy-goro’s house, Itchy-goro, with his gook face and gook eyes and his big liar’s mouth — and then he cracked the lid of the grill just enough to slosh some gasoline inside before slamming it shut.

He started counting off the seconds, one-a-thousand, two-a-thousand, and there was no sound now, nothing but silence.

And when he struck the match and flung it in he felt the way he did when he was alone in his room watching the videos he hid from his mother, making himself hard and then soft and then hard again.

Sanjuro Ichiguro was standing at the picture window, admiring the way the light sifted through the pale yellow-green leaves of the bamboo he’d planted along the pathway to the front door and down the slope to the neighbors’ yard. This was a variety of bamboo called Buddha’s Belly, for the plump swellings between its joints, perfect for poor soils and dry climates, and he fed and watered it sparingly, so as to produce the maximal swelling. He’d planted other varieties too — the yellow groove, the marbled, the golden — but Buddha’s Belly was his favorite because his father had prized it and it reminded him of home. He didn’t care so much about the cherry trees on the east side of the house — they were almost a cliché—but Setsuko had insisted on them. If they were going to have to live so far away from home — Six thousand miles! she’d kept repeating, riding a tide of woe as they packed and shipped their things and said goodbye to their families in Okutama nearly a decade ago — then she wanted at least to make this house and this sun-blasted yard into something beautiful, something Japanese set down amidst the scrub oak and manzanita. He’d hired a carpenter to erect the torn’ to frame her view of the cherry trees and a pair of Mexican laborers to dig a little jigsaw pond out front so she could rest there in the late afternoon and watch the koi break the surface while the lily pads revealed their flowers and the dragonflies hovered and he sat entombed in the steel box of the car, stuck in traffic.

From the kitchen came the smell of dinner — garlic, green onions, sesame oil. His commute from Pasadena had been murder, nearly two hours when it should have been half of that, but some idiot had plowed into the back end of another idiot and then a whole line of cars joined in the fun and the freeway was down to one lane by the time he got there. But he was home now and the light was exquisite, the air was rich with whatever it was Setsuko was preparing and in his hand he held a glass of Onikoroshi, chilled to perfection. He was remembering the pond, the old one, the one he’d made too shallow so that the raccoons had wallowed in it at night and made sashimi of the koi that had cost him a small fortune because he wanted to establish a breeding stock and his salary at JPL

allowed him the freedom to purchase the very best of everything.

The raccoons. They were a hazard of living up here, he supposed. Like the coyotes that had made off with Setsuko’s cat while she was standing right in front of the house, not ten feet away, watering the begonias. And that bird. A great long-legged thing that might have been a stork but for the pewter glaze of its feathers. He’d come out one morning at dawn to get a head start on the traffic, his car keys dangling from one hand, his lucky ceramic mug and a thermos of green tea in the other, only to see it there up to its knees in the pond, his marble-white purachina ogon clasped between the twin levers of its bill as neatly as if the bird were an animated pair of chopsticks, hashi with legs and wings. That was his metaphor. His joke. And he used it on his colleagues at work, the whole story, from the snatching of the fish to his outraged shout to the bird’s startled flapping as it wrote its way across the sky, refining it in the telling till the fact that the fish had cost him sixteen hundred dollars only underscored the hilarity — he even called Setsuko from his cell on the way home and told her too: Hashi with wings.

Suddenly his eyes were drawn to the neighboring yard, to a drift of movement there, and he felt the smallest tick of irritation. It was that kid, that boy, the one who’d insulted him to his face. And what was he up to now? The grill, the nightly ritual with the grill, and why couldn’t the mother cook in the oven like anyone else? These weren’t feudal times. They weren’t cavemen, were they? He raised the glass to his nose to feel the cold rim of it there and inhale the scent of his sake. He took a sip, then another long sniff, and it calmed him. This was the scent of pleasure, of unwinding after work, of civility, the scent of a country where people would never dream of calling their next-door neighbor a gook motherfucker or anything else for that matter. And while he understood perfectly well the term motherfucker, its significance escaped him, unless it had to do with incest or some infantile fixation with marital sex, in which case the preponderance of men were indeed motherfuckers. But it was the gook part of the equation that truly mystified him. Colin Andrews, at work, had flinched when Sanjuro had asked him its meaning, but then put on the bland frozen-eyed look Americans assumed when confronting racial issues and explained that it was a derogatory term for the Vietnamese deriving from the war there in the sixties, but that had only further confused him. How could this boy, even if he was mentally deficient — and he was, he was sure of it — ever confuse him, a Japanese, with one of those spindly little underfed peasants from Vietnam?