Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  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: Shūbun-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.

  THIRTEEN HUNDRED RATS

  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.

  People began to worry about him, and understandably so. Ours is a fairly close-knit community of a hundred and twenty souls, give or take a few, distributed among some fifty-two stone-and-timber houses erected nearly a century ago in what the industrialist B.P. Newhouse hoped would be a model of Utopian living. We are not Utopians, at least not in this generation, but our village, set as it is in the midst of six hundred acres of dense forest at the end of a consummately discreet road some forty miles from the city, has fostered, we like to think, a closeness and uniformity of outlook you wouldn’t find in some of the newer developments built right up to the edges of the malls, gallerias and factory outlets that surround them.

  He should have a dog, people said. That sounded perfectly reasonable to me. My wife and I have a pair of shelties (as well as two lorikeets, whose chatter provides a tranquil backdrop to our evenings by the fireplace, and one very fat angelfish in a tank all his own on a stand in my study). One evening, at dinner, my wife glanced at me over her reading glasses and said, “Do you know that according to this article in the paper, ninety-three percent of pet owners say their pets make them smile at least once a day?” The shelties—Tim and Tim II—gazed up from beneath the table with wondering eyes as I fed scraps of meat into their mobile and receptive mouths.

  “You think I ought to speak with him?” I said. “Gerard, I mean?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” my wife said. And then, the corners of her mouth sinking toward her chin, she added, “The poor man.”

  I went to visit him the next day—a Saturday, as it happened. The dogs needed walking, so I took them both with me, by way of example, I suppose, and because when I’m home—and not away on the business that takes me all over the world, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time—I like to give them as much attention as I can. Gerard’s cottage was half a mile or so from our house, and I enjoyed the briskness of the season—it was early December, the holidays coming on, a fresh breeze spanking my cheeks. I let the dogs run free ahead of me and admired the way the pine forest B.P. Newhouse had planted all those years ago framed and sculpted the sky. The first thing I noticed on
coming up the walk was that Gerard hadn’t bothered to rake the leaves from his lawn or cover any of his shrubs against the frost. There were other signs of neglect: the storm windows weren’t up yet, garbage overspilled the two cans in the driveway, and a pine bough, casualty of the last storm, lay across the roof of the house like the severed hand of a giant. I rang the bell.

  Gerard was a long time answering. When finally he did come to the door, he held it open just a crack and gazed out at me as if I were a stranger. (And I was nothing of the sort—our parents had known each other, we’d played couples bridge for years and had once taken a road trip to Hyannis Port together, not to mention the fact that we saw each other at the lake nearly every day in the summer, shared cocktails at the clubhouse and basked in an air of mutual congratulation over our separate decisions not to complicate our lives with the burden of children.) “Gerard,” I said. “Hello. How are you feeling?”

  He said nothing. He looked thinner than usual, haggard. I wondered if the rumors were true—that he wasn’t eating, wasn’t taking care of himself, that he’d given way to despair.

  “I was just passing by and thought I’d stop in,” I said, working up a grin though I didn’t feel much in the mood for levity and had begun to wish I’d stayed home and let my neighbor suffer in peace. “And look,” I said, “I’ve brought Tim and Tim II with me.” The dogs, hearing their names, drew themselves up out of the frost-blighted bushes and pranced across the doormat, inserting the long damp tubes of their snouts in the crack of the door.

  Gerard’s voice was hoarse. “I’m allergic to dogs,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, after we’d gone through the preliminaries and I was seated on the cluttered couch in front of the dead fireplace while Tim and Tim II whined from the front porch, I said, “Well, what about a cat?” And then, because I was mortified at the state to which he’d sunk—his clothes were grubby, he smelled, the house was like the lounge in a transient hotel—I found myself quoting my wife’s statistic about smiling pet owners.

  “I’m allergic to cats too,” he said. He was perched uncomfortably on the canted edge of a rocker and his eyes couldn’t seem to find my face. “But I understand your concern, and I appreciate it. And you’re not the first—half a dozen people have been by, pushing one thing or another on me: pasta salad, a baked ham, profiteroles, and pets too. Siamese fighting fish, hamsters, kittens. Mary Martinson caught me at the post office the other day, took hold of my arm and lectured me for fifteen minutes on the virtues of emus. Can you believe it?”

  “I feel foolish,” I said.

  “No, don’t. You’re right, all of you—I need to snap out of it. And you’re right about a pet too.” He rose from the chair, which rocked crazily behind him. He was wearing a stained pair of white corduroy shorts and a sweatshirt that made him look as gaunt as the Masai my wife and I had photographed on our safari to Kenya the previous spring. “Let me show you,” he said, and he wound his way through the tumbling stacks of magazines and newspapers scattered round the room and disappeared into the back hall. I sat there, feeling awkward—was this what it would be like if my wife should die before me?—but curious too. And, in a strange way, validated. Gerard Loomis had a pet to keep him company: mission accomplished.

  When he came back into the room, I thought at first he’d slipped into some sort of garish jacket or cardigan, but then I saw, with a little jolt of surprise, that he was wearing a snake. Or, that is, a snake was draped over his shoulders, its extremities dangling beyond the length of his arms. “It’s a python,” he said. “Burmese. They get to be twenty-five feet long, though this one’s just a baby.”

  I must have said something, but I can’t really recall now what it was. I wasn’t a herpetophobe or anything like that. It was just that a snake wasn’t what we’d had in mind. Snakes didn’t fetch, didn’t bound into the car panting their joy, didn’t speak when you held a rawhide bone just above shoulder level and twitched it invitingly. As far as I knew, they didn’t do much of anything except exist. And bite.

  “So what do you think?” he said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, as if he were trying to convince himself.

  “Nice,” I said.

  I don’t know why I’m telling this story—perhaps because what happened to Gerard could happen to any of us, I suppose, especially as we age and our spouses age and we’re increasingly set adrift. But the thing is, the next part of what I’m going to relate here is a kind of fiction, really, or a fictive reconstruction of actual events, because two days after I was introduced to Gerard’s python—he was thinking then of naming it either Robbie or Siddhartha—my wife and I went off to Switzerland for an account I was overseeing there and didn’t return for four months. In the interval, here’s what happened.

  There was a heavy snowfall the week before Christmas that year and for the space of nearly two days the power lines were down. Gerard woke the first morning to a preternaturally cold house and his first thought was for the snake. The man in the pet shop at the mall had given him a long lecture before he bought the animal. “They make great pets,” he’d said. “You can let them roam the house if you want and they’ll find the places where they’re comfortable. And the nice thing is they’ll come to you and curl up on the couch or wherever, because of your body heat, you understand.” The man—he wore a nametag that read Bozeman and he looked to be in his forties, with a gray-flecked goatee and his hair drawn back in a patchily dyed ponytail—clearly enjoyed dispensing advice. As well he should, seeing that he was charging some four hundred dollars for a single reptile that must have been as common as a garden worm in its own country. “But most of all, though, especially in this weather, you’ve got to keep him warm. This is a tropical animal we’re talking about here, you understand? Never—and I mean never—let the temperature fall below eighty.”

  Gerard tried the light on the nightstand, but it was out. Ditto the light in the hall. Outside, the snow fell in clumps, as if it had been preformed into snowballs somewhere high in the troposphere. In the living room, the thermostat read sixty-three degrees, and when he tried to click the heat on, nothing happened. The next thing he knew he was crumpling newspaper and stacking kindling in the fireplace, and where were the matches? A quick search round the house, everything a mess (and here the absence of Marietta bit into him, down deep, like a parasitical set of teeth), the drawers stuffed with refuse, dishes piled high, nothing where it was supposed to be. Finally he retrieved an old lighter from a pair of paint-stained jeans on the floor in the back of the closet and he had the fire going. Then he went looking for Siddhartha. He found the snake curled up under the kitchen sink where the hot water pipe fed into the faucet and dishwasher, but it was all but inanimate, as cold and slick as a garden hose left out in the frost.

  It was also surprisingly heavy, especially for an animal that hadn’t eaten in the two weeks it had been in the house, but he dragged it, stiff and frigid, from its cachette, and laid it before the fireplace. While he was making coffee in the kitchen, he gazed out the window on the tumble of the day, and thought of all those years he’d gone in to work in weather like this, in all weathers actually, and felt a stab of nostalgia. Maybe he should go back to work—if not in his old capacity, from which he was gratefully retired, then on a part-time basis, just to keep his hand in, just to get out of the house and do something useful. On an impulse he picked up the phone, thinking to call Alex, his old boss, and sound him out, but the phone line was down too.

  Back in the living room, he sank into the couch with his coffee and watched the snake as it came slowly back to itself, its muscles shivering in slow waves from head to tail like a soft breeze trailing over a still body of water. By the time he’d had a second cup of coffee and fixed himself an egg on the gas range, the crisis—if that was what it was—had passed. Siddhartha seemed fine. He never moved much even in the best of times, with the heat on high and the electric blanket Gerard had bought for him draped across the big Plexiglas terrarium he liked to curl up in,
and so it was difficult to say. Gerard sat there a long while, stoking the fire, watching the snake unfurl its muscles and flick the dark fork of its tongue, until a thought came to him: maybe Siddhartha was hungry. When Gerard had asked the pet shop proprietor what to feed him, Bozeman had answered, “Rats.” Gerard must have looked dubious, because the man had added, “Oh, I mean you can give him rabbits when he gets bigger, and that’s a savings really, in time and energy, because you won’t have to feed him as often, but you’d be surprised—snakes, reptiles in general, are a lot more efficient than we are. They don’t have to feed the internal furnace all the time with filet mignon and hot fudge sundaes, and they don’t need clothes or fur coats either.” He paused to gaze down at the snake where it lay in its terrarium, basking under a heat lamp. “I just fed this guy his rat yesterday. You shouldn’t have to give him anything for a week or two, anyway. He’ll let you know.”

  “How?” Gerard had asked.

  A shrug. “Could be a color thing, where you notice his pattern isn’t as bright maybe. Or he’s just, I don’t know, what you’d call lethargic.”

  They’d both looked down at the snake then, its eyes like two pebbles, its body all but indistinguishable from the length of rough wood it was stretched out on. It was no more animate than the glass walls of the terrarium and Gerard wondered how anyone, even an expert, could tell if the thing was alive or dead. Then he wrote the check.

  But now he found himself chafing at the cusp of an idea: the snake needed to be fed. Of course it did. It had been two weeks—why hadn’t he thought of it before? He was neglecting the animal and that wasn’t right. He got up from the couch to close off the room and build up the fire, then went out to shovel the driveway and take the car down the long winding community road to the highway and on into Newhouse and the mall. It was a harrowing journey. Trucks threw blankets of slush over the windshield and the beating of the wipers made him dizzy. When he arrived, he was relieved to see that the mall had electricity, the whole place lit up like a Las Vegas parade for the marketing and selling of all things Christmas, and with a little deft maneuvering he was able to wedge his car between a plowed drift and the handicapped space in front of the pet store.