T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“Don’t use that language,” Ken said automatically.

“A little one, maybe,” Pat said, “a cocker or a sheltie.”

“I don’t want a dog. I want a hive. A beehive. That’s what I want.” He was balancing like a tightrope walker on the edge of the fireplace apron.

“Bees?” Ken demanded. “What kind of pet is that?” He was angry. It seemed he was always angry lately.

Pat forestalled him, her tone soft as a caress. “Bees, darling?” she said. “Can you tell us what you like about them? Is it because they’re so useful, because of the honey, I mean?”

Anthony was up on one foot. He tipped over twice before he answered. “Because they have no mercy.”

“Mercy?” Pat repeated.

“Three weeks, that’s how long a worker lasts in the summer,” Anthony said.

“They kick the drones out to die. The spent workers too.” He looked at Ken.

“You fit in or you die.”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ken was shouting; he couldn’t help himself.

Anthony’s face crumpled up. His cheeks were corrugated, the spikes of his hair stood out like thorns. “You hate me,” he whined. “You fuck, you dickhead — you hate me, don’t you, don’t you?”

“Ken!” Pat cried, but Ken already had him by the arm. “Don’t you ever—” he said.

“Ever what? Ever what? Say ‘fuck’? You do it, you do it, you do it!” Anthony was in a rage, jerking away, tears on his face, shouting. “Upstairs, at night. I hear you. Fucking. That’s what you do. Grunting and fucking just like, like, like dogs !”

“I’ll need to see him three days a week,” Dr. Barebaum said. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just climbed several flights of stairs.

Anthony was out in the car with Pat. He’d spent the past forty-five minutes sequestered with Barebaum. “Is he — is he all right?” Ken asked. “I mean, is he normal?”

Barebaum leaned back in his chair and made a little pyramid of his fingers. “Adjustment problems,” he breathed. “He’s got a lot of hostility. He’s had a difficult life.”

Ken stared down at the carpet.

“He tells me,” Barebaum dredged up the words as if from some inner fortress, “he tells me he wants a dog.”

Ken sat rigid in the chair. This must be what it feels like before they switch on the current at Sing Sing, he thought. “No, you’ve got it wrong. We wanted to get him a dog, but he said no. In fact, he went schizoid on us.”

Barebaum’s nose wrinkled up at the term “schizoid.” Ken regretted it instantly. “Yes,” the doctor drawled, “hmmph. But the fact is the boy quite distinctly told me the whole blow-up was because he does indeed want a dog. You know, Mr., ah—”

“Mallow.”

“—Mallow, we often say exactly the opposite of what we mean; you are aware of that, aren’t you?”

Ken said nothing. He studied the weave of the carpet.

After a moment, the doctor cleared his throat. “You do have health insurance?” he said.

In all, Anthony was with them just over three years. The dog — a sheltie pup Ken called “Skippy” and Anthony referred to alternately as “Ken” and “Turd”—was a mistake, they could see that now. For the first few months or so, Anthony had ignored it, except to run squealing through the house, the puppy’s warm excreta cupped in his palms, shouting, “It shit! It shit! The dog shit!” Ken, though, got to like the feel of the pup’s wet nose on his wrist as he skimmed the morning paper or sat watching TV in the evening. The pup was alive, it was high-spirited and joyful, and it brought him back to his own childhood in a way that Anthony, with his gloom and his sneer, never could have. “I want a hive,” Anthony said, over and over again. “My very own hive.”

Ken ignored him — bees were dangerous, after all, and this was a residential neighborhood — until the day Anthony finally did take an interest in Skippy. It was one of those rare days when Pat’s car was at the garage, so Ken picked her up at work and they arrived home together. The house was quiet. Skippy, who usually greeted them at the door in a paroxysm of licking, rolling, leaping, and tail-thumping, was nowhere to be seen. And Anthony, judging from the low-threshold hum washing over the house, was up in his room listening to the bee tapes Pat had given him for Christmas. “Skippy,” Ken called, “here, boy!” No Skippy. Pat checked the yard, the basement, the back room. Finally, together, they mounted the stairs to Anthony’s room.

Anthony was in the center of the bed, clad only in his underwear, reprising the ritual Ken had long since grown to accept (Dr. Barebaum claimed it was nothing to worry about—“It’s his way of meditating, that’s all, and if it calms him down, why fight it?”). Huge color photographs of bees obliterated the walls, but these were legitimate photos, clipped from the pages of The Apiarian’s Monthly , another gift from Pat. Anthony looked bloated, fatter than ever, pale and white as a grub. When he became aware of them, he slipped the headphones from his ears. “Honey,” Pat said, reaching down to ruffle his hair, “have you seen Skippy?”

It took him a moment to answer. He looked bewildered, as if she’d asked him to solve an equation or name the twenty biggest cities in Russia. “I put him in his cell,” he said finally.

“Cell?” Ken echoed.

“In the hive,” Anthony said. “The big hive.”

It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy’s poor singed carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced — Pat wouldn’t, couldn’t cook in it, ever again. It was Ken too who lost control of himself that night and slapped Anthony’s sick pale swollen face till Pat pulled him off. In the end, Anthony got his hive, thirty thousand honeybees in a big white wooden box with fifteen frames inside, and Barebaum got to see Anthony two more days a week.

At first, the bees seemed to exert a soothing influence on the boy. He stopped muttering to himself, used his utensils at the table, and didn’t seem quite as vulnerable to mood swings as he had. After school and his daily sessions with Barebaum, he’d spend hours tending the hive, watching the bees at their compulsive work, humming softly to himself as if in a trance. Ken was worried he’d be stung and bought him a gauze bonnet and gloves, but he rarely wore them. And when he was stung — daily, it seemed — he displayed the contusions proudly, as if they were battle scars. For Ken and Pat, it was a time of accommodation, and they were quietly optimistic. Gone was the smiling boy they’d taken into their home, but at least now he wasn’t so — there was no other word for it — so odd, and he seemed less agitated, less ready to fly off the handle.

The suicide attempt took them by surprise.

Ken found him, at dusk, crouched beneath the hive and quietly bleeding from both wrists. Pat’s X-ACTO knife lay in the grass beside him, black with blood. In the hospital the next day, Anthony looked lost and vulnerable, looked like a little boy again. Barebaum was there with them. “It’s a phase,” he said, puffing for breath. “He’s been very depressed lately.”

“Why?” Pat asked, sweeping Anthony’s hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. “Your bees,” she choked. “What would your bees do without you?”

Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He’d contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers — Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone were killing them — but Pat overruled him. “He needs us,” she said. “He has no one else to turn to.” They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she said.