Part 7 (1/2)

He came back five months later with the first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his little-boy exuberance, sometimes infectious, sometimes wearisome, but always there, was gone. He had grown up. And for the first time I remember him talking about the news . . . how bad it was, I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO splinter group called the Sons of the Jihad (a name that always sounded to me hideously like a Catholic community service group somewhere in western Pennsylvania) set off a Squirt Bomb in London, polluting sixty per cent of it and making the rest of it extremely unhealthy for people who ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of fifty, for that matter). The year we tried to blockade the Philippines after the Cedeo administration accepted a 'small group' of Red Chinese advisors (fifteen thousand or so, according to our spy satellites), and only backed down when it became clear that (a) the Chinese weren't kidding about emptying the holes if we didn't pull back, and (b) the American people weren't all that crazy about committing ma.s.s suicide over the Philippine Islands. That was also the year some other group of crazy motherf.u.c.kers - Albanians, I think - tried to air-spray the AIDS virus over Berlin.

This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but it depressed the s.h.i.+t out of Bobby.

'Why are people so G.o.ddam mean?' he asked me one day. We were at the summer place in New Hamps.h.i.+re, it was late August, and most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases. The cabin had that sad, deserted look it always got just before we all went our separate ways. For me it meant back to New York, and for Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places . . . he had spent the summer reading sociology and geology texts - how's that for a crazy salad? - and said he wanted to run a couple of experiments down there. He said it in a casual, offhand way, but I had seen my mother looking at him with a peculiar thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby's compa.s.s needle had finally stopped swinging and had started pointing.

'Why are they so mean?' I asked. 'I'm supposed to answer that?'

'Someone better,' he said. 'Pretty soon, too, the way things are going.'

'They're going the way they always went,' I said, 'and I guess they're doing it because people were built to be mean. If you want to lay blame, blame G.o.d.'

'That's bulls.h.i.+t. I don't believe it. Even that double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be bulls.h.i.+t in the end. And don't tell me it's just economic pressures, the conflict between the haves and have-nots, because that doesn't explain all of it, either.'

'Original sin,' I said. 'It works for me - it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.'

'Well,' Bobby said, 'maybe it is original sin. But what's the instrument, big brother? Have you ever asked yourself that?'

'Instrument? What instrument? I'm not following you.'

'I think it's the water,' Bobby said moodily.

'Say what?'

'The water. Something in the water.

He looked at me.

'Or something that isn't.'

The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I didn't see him again until he showed up at my apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford s.h.i.+rt and carrying the two gla.s.s boxes. That was three years later.

'Howdy, Howie,' he said, stepping in and giving me a nonchalant swat on the back as if it had been only three days.

'Bobby!' I yelled, and threw both arms around him in a bear-hug. Hard angles bit into my chest, and I heard an angry hive-hum.

'I'm glad to see you too,' Bobby said, 'but you better go easy. You're upsetting the natives.'

I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down the big paper bag he was carrying and unslung his shoulder-bag. Then he carefully brought the gla.s.s boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in one, a wasps' nest in the other. The bees were already settling down and going back to whatever business bees have, but the wasps were clearly unhappy about the whole thing.

'Okay, Bobby,' I said. I looked at him and grinned. I couldn't seem to stop grinning. 'What are you up to this time)'

He unzipped the tote-bag and brought out a mayonnaise jar which was half-filled with a clear liquid.

'See this?' he said.

'Yeah. Looks like either water or white lightning.'

'It's actually both, if you can believe that. It came from an artesian well in La Plata, a little town forty miles east of Waco, and before I turned it into this concentrated form, there were five gallons of it. I've got a regular little distillery running down there, Howie, but I don't think the government will ever bust me for it.' He was grinning, and now the grin broadened. 'Water's all it is, but it's still the G.o.dd.a.m.ndist popskull the human race has ever seen.'

'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.'

'I know you don't. But you will. You know what, Howie?'

'What?'

'If the idiotic human race can manage to hold itself together for another six months, I'm betting it'll hold itself together for all time.'

He lifted the mayonnaise jar, and one magnified Bobby-eye stared at me through it with huge solemnity. 'This is the big one,' he said. 'The cure for the worst disease to which h.o.m.o sapiens falls prey.'

'Cancer?'

'Nope,' Bobby said. 'War. Barroom brawls. Drive-by shootings. The whole mess. Where's your bathroom, Howie? My back teeth are floating.'

When he came back he had not only turned the Mumford tee-s.h.i.+rt rightside out, he had combed his hair - nor had his method of doing this changed, I saw. Bobby just held his head under the faucet for awhile then raked everything back with his fingers.

He looked at the two gla.s.s boxes and p.r.o.nounced the bees and wasps back to normal. 'Not that a wasps' nest ever approaches anything even closely resembling 'normal', Howie. Wasps are social insects, like bees and ants, but unlike bees, which are almost always sane, and ants, which have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are total full-bore lunatics.' He smiled. 'Just like us good old h.o.m.o saps.' He took the top off the gla.s.s box containing the beehive.

'Tell you what, Bobby,' I said. I was smiling, but the smile felt much too wide. 'Put the top back on and just tell me about it, what do you say? Save the demonstration for later. I mean, my landlord's a real p.u.s.s.ycat, but the super's this big bull d.y.k.e who smokes Odie Perode cigars and has thirty pounds on me. She - '

'You'll like this,' Bobby said, as if I hadn't spoken at all - a habit as familiar to me as his Ten Fingers Method of Hair Grooming. He was never impolite but often totally absorbed. And could I stop him? Aw s.h.i.+t, no. It was too good to have him back. I mean I think I knew even then that something was going to go totally wrong, but when I was with Bobby for more than five minutes, he just hypnotized me. He was Lucy holding the football and promising me this time for sure, and I was Charlie Brown, rus.h.i.+ng down the field to kick it. 'In fact, you've probably seen it done before - they show pictures of it in magazines from time to time, or in TV wildlife doc.u.mentaries. It's nothing very special, but it looks like a big deal because people have got these totally irrational prejudices about bees.'

And the weird thing was, he was right - I had seen it before.

He stuck his hand into the box between the hive and the gla.s.s. In less than fifteen seconds his hand had acquired a living black-and-yellow glove. It brought back an instant of total recall: sitting in front of the TV, wearing footie pajamas and clutching my Paddington Bear, maybe half an hour before bedtime (and surely years before Bobby was born), watching with mingled horror, disgust, and fascination as some beekeeper allowed bees to cover his entire face. They had formed a sort of executioner's hood at first, and then he had brushed them into a grotesque living beard.

Bobby winced suddenly, sharply, then grinned.

'One of em stung me,' he said. 'They're still a little upset from the trip. I hooked a ride with the local insurance lady from La Plata to Waco - she's got an old Piper Cub - and flew some little commuter airline, Air a.s.shole, I think it was, up to New Orleans from there. Made about forty connections, but I swear to G.o.d it was the cab ride from LaGarbage that got em crazy. Second Avenue's still got more potholes than the Bergenstra.s.se after the Germans surrendered.'

'You know, I think you really ought to get your hand out of there, Bobs,' I said. I kept waiting for some of them to fly out - I could imagine chasing them around with a rolled-up magazine for hours, bringing them down one by one, as if they were escapees in some old prison movie. But none of them had escaped . . . at least so far.

'Relax, Howie. You ever see a bee sting a flower? Or even hear of it, for that matter?'

'You don't look like a flower.'

He laughed. 's.h.i.+t, you think bees know what a flower looks like? Uh-uh! No way, man! They don't know what a flower looks like any more than you or I know what a cloud sounds like. They know I'm sweet because I excrete sucrose dioxin in my sweat . . . along with thirty-seven other dioxins, and those're just the ones we know about.'

He paused thoughtfully.

'Although I must confess I was careful to, uh, sweeten myself up a little tonight. Ate a box of chocolate-covered cherries on the plane - '

'Oh Bobby, Jesus!'

' - and had a couple of MallowCremes in the taxi coming here.'

He reached in with his other hand and carefully began to brush the bees away. I saw him wince once more just before he got the last of them off, and then he eased my mind considerably by replacing the lid on the gla.s.s box. I saw a red swelling on each of his hands: one in the cup of the left palm, another high up on the right, near what the palmists call the Bracelets of Fortune. He'd been stung, but I saw well enough what he'd set out to show me: what looked like at least four hundred bees had investigated him. Only two had stung.

He took a pair of tweezers out of his jeans watch-pocket, and went over to my desk. He moved the pile of ma.n.u.script beside the w.a.n.g Micro I was using in those days and trained my Tensor lamp on the place where the pages had been - fiddling with it until it formed a tiny hard spotlight on the cherrywood.

'Writin anything good, Bow-Wow?' he asked casually, and I felt the hair stiffen on the back of my neck. When was the last time he'd called me Bow-Wow? When he was four? Six? s.h.i.+t, man, I don't know. He was working carefully on his left hand with the tweezers. I saw him extract a tiny something that looked like a nostril hair and place it in my ashtray.