Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  ASH MONDAY

  He’d always loved the smell of gasoline. It reminded him of when he was little, when he was seven or eight and Grady came to live with them. When Grady moved in he’d brought his yellow Chevy Super Sport with him, backing it into the weeds by the side of the garage on a sleek black trailer he must have rented for the day because it was gone in the morning. That first night had fallen over Dill like an absence, like all the nights then and most of the days too, a whole tumble of nothing that sparked with a particle of memory here and there. But he remembered the trailer, and Grady—of course he remembered Grady because Grady was here in this house till he was eleven years old—and he remembered seeing the car mounted on cement blocks the next morning as if it had gone through a wall at a hundred miles an hour and got hung up on the rubble. And he remembered the smell of gasoline. Grady wore it like perfume.

  Now Dill was thirteen, with a car of his own, or at least the one he’d have when he was old enough to get his learner’s permit, and when he tried to picture Grady, what Grady looked like, he could see Grady’s hat, the grease-feathered baseball cap that had a #4 and a star sign on it in a little silver box in front, and he could see Grady’s silver shades beneath the bill of that cap, and below that there must have been a nose and a mouth but all he could remember was the mustache that hooked down over the corners of Grady’s lips, making him look like the sad face Billy Bottoms used to draw on every available surface when they were in fifth grade.

  At the moment, he was in the yard, smelling gasoline, thinking of Grady, looking at his own piece-of-shit car parked there by the garage where the Super Sport had sunk into its cement blocks till his mother had it towed away to the junkyard. He felt the weight of the gas can in his hand, lifted his face to the sun and the hot breath sifting through the canyon, but for just a fraction of a second he forgot what he was doing there, as if he’d gone outside of himself. This was a thing that happened to him, that had always happened to him, another kind of absence that was so usual he hardly noticed it. It irritated his mother. Baffled his teachers. He wished it wouldn’t happen or happen so often, but there it was. He was a dreamer, he guessed. That was what his mother called him. A dreamer.

  And here came her voice through the kitchen window, her caught-high-in-the-throat voice that snapped like the braided tail of a whip: “Dill, what are you doing standing there? The potatoes are almost done. I need you to light the fire and put up the meat right thisminute!”

  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 torii 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 her
e, 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?

  Angry now, angry all at once, he called over his shoulder to Setsuko. “He’s at it again.”

  Her face appeared in the kitchen doorway, round as the moon. He saw that she’d had her hair done, two waves cresting on either side of her brow and an elevated dome built up on top of it. She looked almost like an American, like a gaijin, and he didn’t know whether he liked that or not. “Who?” she asked in Japanese—they always spoke Japanese at home.

  “The kid next door. The delinquent. The little shit. Now he’s using gasoline to cook his hot dogs or hamburgers or whatever it is, can you imagine?”

  She glanced at the window, but from where she was standing the angle was wrong so that she must have seen only the sky and the tips of the bamboo waving in the breeze. If she’d taken five steps forward, she could have seen what he was talking about, the kid dancing round the rusted grill with the red-and-yellow gas can and his box of kitchen matches, but she didn’t. “Do you like my hair?” she said. “I went to Mrs. Yamamura at the beauty parlor today and she thought we would try something different. Just for a change. Do you like it?”

  “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 was trying to kill a whole field full of rattle-snakes. 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.”