T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

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, past 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?”