T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

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.”

“But we’re not Catholic,” he said. There were only seven cars left in the parking lot. He counted them.

“No,” she said, shaking her head but keeping her face locked up all the same.

“We’re not anything, are we?”

She was busy with the steering wheel, maneuvering her own car, her Nissan Sentra that was only slightly better than the piece-of-shit Toyota, around the elevated islands that divided the parking lot. The radio gave up a soft hum and a weak voice bleated out one of the easy-listening songs she was always playing. She shook her head again. Let out an audible breath. Shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I believe in God, if that’s what you’re asking.” He said nothing.

“Your grandparents, my parents, I mean, were Presbyterian, but we didn’t go to church much. Christmas, Easter. In name only, I guess.”

“So what does that make me?”

Another shrug. “You can be anything you want. Why? Are you interested in religion?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re a Protestant, then. That’s all. Just a Protestant.”

He was dumping more briquettes into the grill now, the wind teasing the black powder that wasn’t ash off the hard-baked stony little things that weren’t really charcoal at all. Then he was squirting them with the clear dry-smelling fluid that was nothing like gasoline with its heavy rich petroleum sweetness, soaking them down, thinking every day was made out of ash, Ash Monday, Ash Tuesday, Ash Saturday and Sunday too. He glanced up to see a car pulling into the driveway at the front of the house. The car door slammed, and a man his mother’s age stepped out into the wind with an armload of flowers and a bottle that was probably wine or maybe whiskey. Dill looked to Itchy-goro’s house, the windows painted over with sun so that he couldn’t see whether Itchy-goro was watching or not, and then he lit the match.

……

It was a Monday and she hated Mondays most of all because on Mondays Sanjuro always went to work early to set an example for the others, stealing out of the house while it was dark yet and the little thieves of the night, the raccoons, coyotes and rats, were just crawling back into their holes. She’d awaken with the first colorless stirrings of light and lie there in the still room, thinking of her parents and the house she’d grown up in, and feel as if the ground had gone out from under her. This morning was no different. She woke to grayness and for a long while stared up at the ceiling as the color crept back into things, and then she pushed herself up and went down the hallway to the kitchen and lit the stove under the kettle. It wasn’t till she was blowing softly into her second cup of tea and gazing out the window into the crowded green struts of the bamboo that she remembered that today was different, today was special: Shubun-no-hi, the autumnal equinox, a holiday in Japan even if it passed unnoticed here.

Her spirits lifted. She would make ohagi, the rice balls coated in bean paste people left at the graves of their ancestors to honor the spirits of the dead, and she’d put on one of her best kimono and burn incense too, and when Sanjuro came home they’d have a quiet celebration and neither of them would mention the fact that the graves of their ancestors were six thousand miles away. She thought about that while she was in the shower — about that distance and how long a broom she’d have to find to sweep those graves clean — then she put on the rice and went outside to the garden. If she were in Japan she would have arranged flowers on her parents’

graves — red flowers, the Higanbana of tradition — but here the closest thing she could find was the bougainvillea that grew along the fence.

The wind rattled the bamboo as she went down the slope with her clippers and the cedar-shake roof of the house below rose to greet her. This was the boy’s house, and as she bent to cut the brilliant red plumes of the flowers and lay them over one arm, she saw the cooking grill there in the yard and thought back to two nights ago, or was it three? Sanjuro had been beside himself. He’d gone out of his way to buy a plastic squeeze bottle of starter fluid for these people, the boy and his mother, thinking to help them, and then the boy had stood out there in full view, looking up at the windows and smirking as he fed the fire with long iridescent strings of fuel till the strings were fire themselves. He wasn’t thankful. He wasn’t respectful. He was a bad boy, a delinquent, just as Sanjuro had said all along, and the mother was worse — and a teacher, no less.

They were bad people, that was all, no different from the criminals on the news every night, stabbing each other, screaming, their faces opening up in one great maw of despair.

Setsuko felt the weight of the sun. A gust flailed the bamboo and flung grit at her face. She made her way back up the hill, the wind whipping her kimono and sawing at the canes till they were like swords clashing together, and there was wind drift all over the surface of the pond and the koi moiling beneath it like pulsing flames. The mouth of the brass urn took the flowers, a spray of them, and she went down on her knees to get the arrangement just right. But then the wind shifted them and shifted them again, the papery petals flapping against the bamboo that framed the pond, and after a while she gave it up, figuring she’d rearrange them when Sanjuro came home. She was thinking of her mother when she set the incense cone in the burner and put a match to it, the face of the ceramic Buddha glowing through its eye holes as if it were alive.

But the wind, the wind. She got up and was halfway to the house when she heard the first premonitory crackle in the leaves gathered like a skirt at the ankles of the bamboo. She jerked round so violently that her kimono twisted under one foot and she very nearly tripped herself. And she might have caught the fire then, might have dug a frantic scoop of water out of the pond and flung it into the bamboo, might have dashed into the house and dialed 911, but she didn’t. She just stood there motionless as the wind took the flames out of the bamboo and into the yard, rolling on across the hill away from her house and her garden and her tea things and the memory of her mother to set them down in a brilliant sparking burst that was exactly like a fireworks display, cleansing and pure and joyful, on the roof of the house below.

There was a man in our village who never in his life had a pet of any kind until his wife died. By my calculation, Gerard Loomis was in his mid-fifties when Marietta was taken from him, but at the ceremony in the chapel he looked so scorched and stricken people mistook him for a man ten or twenty years older. He sat collapsed in the front pew, his clothes mismatched and his limbs splayed in the extremity of his grief, looking as if he’d been dropped there from a great height, like a bird stripped of its feathers in some aerial catastrophe. Once the funeral was over and we’d all offered up our condolences and gone back to our respective homes, rumors began to circulate. Gerard wasn’t eating. He wouldn’t leave the house or change his clothes. He’d been seen bent over a trash barrel in the front yard, burning patent leather pumps, brassieres, skirts, wigs, even the mink stole with its head and feet still attached that his late wife had worn with pride on Christmas, Easter and Columbus Day.