T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“Maybe I should donate a box of lighter fluid — just leave it on the front porch. Because if he keeps this up he’s going to burn the whole canyon down, I tell you that.”

“It’s nothing. Don’t let it worry you.”

“Nothing? You call this nothing? Wait till your cherry trees go up in smoke, the house, the cars, wait till the fish boil in the pond like it’s a pot on the stove, then tell me it’s nothing.”

The kid struck the match, pulled back the lid and flung it in. There was the muffled concussion of the gasoline going up, flames leaping high off the grill in a jagged corona before sucking themselves back in, and something else, something shooting out like the tail of a rocket and jerking across the ground in a skirt of fire.

—

It was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. The rat came flying out of there squealing like the brakes on the Camry and before he had a chance to react it was rolling in the dirt, and then, still aflame, trying to bury itself in the high weeds in back of the garage. And then the weeds caught fire. Which was intense. And he was running after the thing with the vague intent of crushing its skull under the heel of his shoe or maybe watching to see how long it would take before it died on its own, when here came Itchy-goro flying down the hill like he was on drugs, screaming, “You crazy? You crazy outta your mind?”

The weeds hissed and popped, burrs and stickers mainly, a few tumbleweeds that were all air, the fire already burning itself out because there was nothing to feed it but dirt and gravel. And the rat was just lying there now, blackened and steaming like a marshmallow that’s fallen off the stick and into the coals. But Itchy-goro — he was in his bathrobe and slippers and he had a rake in his hand — jumped over the fence and started beating at the weeds as if he were trying to kill a whole field full of rattlesnakes. Dill just stood there while Itchy-goro cursed in his own language and snatched up the hose that was lying by the side of the garage and sprayed water all over everything like it was some big deal. Then he heard the door slam behind him and he looked over his shoulder to see his mother running toward them in her bare feet and he had a fleeting image of the harsh deep lines that dug in around her toes that were swollen and red from where her shoes pinched her because she was on her feet all day long. “Can’t you get up and get the milk?” she’d say. Or “I’m too exhausted to set the table, can’t you do it?” And then the kicker: “I’ve been on my feet all day long.”

Itchy-goro’s face was twisted out of shape. He looked like one of the dupes in a ninja movie, one of the ten thousand anonymous grimacing fools who rush Jet Li with a two-by-four or tire iron only to be whacked in the throat or the knee and laid out on the ground. “You see?” he was shouting. “You see what he does? Your boy?” Itchy-goro’s hands were trembling. He couldn’t seem to get the hose right, the water arcing up to spatter the wall of the garage, then drooling down to puddle in the dust. The air stank of incinerated weed.

Before his mother could put on her own version of Itchy-goro’s face and say “What on earth are you doing now?” Dill kicked at a stone in the dirt, put his hands on his hips and said, “How was I supposed to know a rat was in there? A rat, Mom. A rat in our cooking grill.”

But she took Itchy-goro’s side, the two of them yelling back and forth—“Dry tinder!” Itchy-goro kept saying — and pretty soon they were both yelling at him. So he gave his mother a look that could peel hide and stalked off around the corner of the garage and didn’t even bother to answer when she called his name out in her shrillest voice three times in a row.

He kept going till he came to the shed where Grady used to keep the chinchillas, and then he went round that too and pushed his way through the door that was hanging by one hinge and into the superheated shadows within. She could cook her own pork chops, that was what he was thinking. Let her give them to Itchy-goro. She always took his side anyway. Why didn’t she just go ahead and marry him? That’s what he’d say to her later when he was good and ready to come in and eat something and listen to her rag on him about his homework: “Marry Itchy-goro if you love him so much.”

It took him a moment, standing slumped in the half-light and breathing in the shit smell of the chinchillas that would probably linger there forever like the smell of the bandages they wrapped the mummies in, before he felt his heartbeat begin to slow. He was sweating. It must have been twenty degrees hotter in there than outside, but he didn’t care. This was where he came when he was upset or when he wanted to think or remember what it had been like when Grady was raising the chinchillas and they’d had to work side by side to keep the cages clean and make sure there was enough food and water for each and every one of them. You needed between eighty and a hundred pelts to make one coat, so Grady would always go on about how they had to keep breeding them to get more and more or they’d never turn a profit. That was his phrase, turn a profit. And Dill remembered how his mother would throw it back at him because he wasn’t turning a profit and never would, the cost of feed and the animals themselves a constant drain — and that was her phrase — but nothing compared to what they were spending on air-conditioning.

“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.