by T. C. Boyle
‘Oh!’ she cried, and she jumped up from the dish of pancakes as if she’d been stung. As if, he says – but that was exactly what had happened. A bee had stung her. Or not a bee – a yellow jacket, Vespula maculifrons, the gold–and–black–banded wasp the locals called a meat bee because of its love for burgers, steaks and chops fresh off the grill. Not to mention carrion.
It was almost funny. A bee sting. But the incredible thing was that Jane had gone through an entire life, all twenty–five years of it, without ever having been stung before – or not that her mother could remember anyway. So this wasn’t funny, wasn’t the casual mishap it might have been for 99 percent of the species, the lucky ones, the nonallergjc and resistant. It was death, that’s what it was. Though Tierwater, fully engaged in the bliss of natural being and chewing his cud of semi–blackened buckwheat meal, didn’t yet realize it. He got up, of course, set down the tin plate and went to her, the fire smoking, the trees dripping, the swatted yellow jacket lying on its back in the dirt and kicking its six moribund legs as if it could live to sting another day.
Jane’s face went red. Her eyes sank into their sockets and bounced back at him like two hard black balls. She couldn’t seem to stop blinking. She couldn’t catch her breath. All this, and still he had no idea, no conception, not the vaguest hint that the plug had been pulled on everything he’d known as life to this moment. ‘What is it,’ he said, trying to laugh it off, ‘a bee sting? Is that it?’
She couldn’t answer him. He held her – what else could he do? He’d never heard of anaphylactic shock, never heard of epinephrine or histamines, he knew from zero to nothing about first aid and CPR, and he was twelve miles from the nearest road. And, besides, it was only a bee sting. Yes, but her heart was trying to tear its way out of her chest even as he held her, and she wet herself, hot urine down her leg in a smear of dirt, the smell of it like vinegar burned in a pan, and here she was on the ground, on her side, vomiting up the blackened paste of the pancakes. Water, he brought her water, and cleared the hair away from her mouth, but there was nothing in her eyes and she was as cold as the dirt she was lying in.
He didn’t know how long he sat there with her, alternately feeling for a pulse and trying to force air down her throat through the ache in his lungs, trying to make her breathe, stir, get up and walk it off, for Christ’s sake. Prayers came back to him then, the faces of the dead, ora pro nobis, and though he was panicked – or because he was panicked – he couldn’t bring himself to move her, even after the mist turned to drizzle and the drizzle to rain. Finally, though – and it must have been late in the afternoon – he pulled her up out of the mud and slid her over one shoulder, nothing heavier in the world, nothing, not stone or lead or all the mountains marching off in neat ranks to Canada. Down the trail then, down the trail to the trailhead, and out to the road and the car and the hospital in Whitefish. He brought her back, all the way back, out of the tall trees and the wet and the sting of the everlasting day, but it didn’t matter to him or to anybody else, because he didn’t bring her back alive.
Part Two
Progress is our most important Product
Santa Ynez, November 2025
I can’t sleep. Christ knows I’m tired enough, my knee throbbing, my back gone into permanent retirement, every muscle in my body stretched to the tearing point and both my shoulders hanging on threads like a puppet’s. I’m beat, whipped, done in and played out. It’s been a day. I’m in bed, in Mac’s place, in a room bigger than a bus station, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Andrea is here beside me, curled up like a question mark and snoring so softly I can barely hear her, and Mac’s pink satin sheets are flowing like bathwater over and under my grateful old man’s feet. Do you want to define cozy? This is it.
Outside, it’s different. Outside is the wind, the horizontal rain, the rending and the howling, outside is the wreckage of the place I’ve called home for the past ten years and all the pens and cages we contrived to design and build for the greater welfare and happiness of the animals. Gone. Just like that. Where the guesthouse used to be there’s a river now, all roiling muscle and deep–brown ribs, no more Rancho Seco, no more Lupine Hill condos, nothing but sirens and searchlights and people clinging to one piece of wreckage or another.
But that’s not what’s keeping me awake. I’ve been through the list of the animals twice already, and I’m satisfied on that score, and Andrea managed to salvage most of my personal belongings (yellowing boxer shorts, the food compressor, the toaster, my beat–up copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Dharma Bums, the odd bottle of sake and assorted foodstuffs). Things are nothing to me anyway. I could rebuild, pack up and move on, live in a ditch or a teepee – or a six–by–eight platform in a redwood tree, for that matter. No, the problem here seems to be my brain – it just won’t shut down. For a while I tried to trace the whole convoluted chain of my thoughts back to the first image – that works most of the time, because sooner or later I forget what the point of the exercise is and then it’s six o’clock in the morning – but perversely, and maybe because there’s been such radical change in my staid and limited sphere here in the past few days, new thoughts kept spinning out of the recovered ones, so that, in going back from the idiosyncrasies of Andrea’s snoring to my mother’s when she fell asleep on the couch with a quilt pulled up to her chin and her drink gone to water in her hand to the way the light came through the kitchen window in the house in Peterskill to Anthony’s Nose and Dunderberg and all the hikers coming down with Lyme disease on the Appalachian Trail, I found myself wondering about the new breed of nature–lovers who take their TV attachments every place they go because the real thing has nothing to offer anymore. Then I got stuck on TV, my boyhood in front of the tube, and before I knew it I was reprising the entire CBS, NBC and ABC schedules for a given week in 1959 or so. That’s how I got to Ronald Reagan. I went through each of the weekdays like beads on a string, got to Saturday night and Have Gun, Will Travel, then Sunday, Ed Sullivan, eight to nine, followed by The General Electric Theater, hosted by the future governor of California and fortieth president of the United States.
I’d stretch out on the rug that smelled of carpet cleaner with my school books scattered round me, and watch the jugglers, comedians and dancing horses that made up Sullivan’s pretty dull affair, and then, if I wheedled and pled, I’d get to stay up half an hour more to watch the drama that followed, because anything was better than bed. And there he was, Ronald Reagan. I was nine years old and I had no idea who he was – I’d never heard of Bedtime for Bonzo or Hellcats or the Gipper or any of the rest of it. I just saw him there, bland and anonymous but for the amazing glistening meatloaf of hair glued to his head and the motto of the company he shilled for: Progress is our most important product. Sure. Of course it is. That makes sense, doesn’t it? We move forward, conquer and foster and discover – plug it in, tune it up – and life just gets better. And what about that house they built for him and his wife in the Pacific Palisades? An intercom in every room, electric switches to close the drapes, electric barbecue and hedge clippers, three TVs, two ranges, two ovens, three refrigerators, two freezers, heat lamps, electric eyes, washers, dryers, a retractable canopy roof for al–fresco dining. That’s progress. And so is naming James Watt your secretary of the interior.
My guts are rumbling: gas, that’s what it is. If I lie absolutely still, it’ll work through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? That’s methane gas, a natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds, and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one more fart’s worth of global warming. I’m a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro–eco–capitalistico guilt: I can’t even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a luxury. In prison we didn’t concern ourselves overmuch about environmental degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They penned u
s up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better: at least we’d be out.
In between gusts the volume comes up on the rain and I can hear it patiently eroding the lashed–down tiles of the roof (two years ago Mac had steel mesh welded over the entire thing and so far it’s held up – no splootching buckets here). Ssssssss, the rain sizzles, fat in a fryer. Andrea snorts, mutters a few incomprehensible syllables and rolls over. More rain. An unidentified flying object hits the side of the house with a thud, a dull booming reverberation that sets tinkling the flesh–toned figurines in the display case (each of the guest bedrooms is decorated after an era in rock–and–roll history – we’re in the Grunge Room, replete with replicas of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam in action, as well as a framed lock of Kurt Cobain’s hair over the legend ‘A Lock of Kurt Cobain’s Hair’). This is crazy. How can I sleep through this? How can anybody sleep through it? How can Andrea, April Wind, Mac, Chuy, Al and Al?
More to the point: how can the animals? And yes, I admit it, I am concerned about them, or concerned all over again, because that’s the way it is with insomnia – the brain, diligent organ that it is, will always manage to come up with something to forestall the inevitable shutdown. Very still now, Andrea between breaths, the wind making a snatch at the rain, and I swear I can hear one of the lions coughing two floors beneath me. I’m not imagining this – there it is again. Sounds like Amaryllis. I can picture them down there, exploring their new quarters, scent–marking the walls, gutting the furniture, ripping up carpets, settling in.
The amazing thing is, no one got hurt.
All those claws, all those teeth, all those hundreds of pounds of irascibility and recalcitrance, the wind blowing up a tornado, the water waist–deep and running slick and fast, and me at seventy–five with my bad knee, savaged back and chewed–up arm and nobody to help but Chuy and five conscripts: this is a recipe for disaster. I didn’t need April Wind, I needed the Marine Corps. But Chuy, never to be mistaken for a genius, especially since the pesticide seemed to have annulled most of the cognitive functions of his brain, really came to the rescue. He did. He saved the day and no doubt about it. Because his idea of roping the cats (and, ultimately, Lily and Petunia) and forcing them to swim for it, as ridiculous as it might sound, was the one thing that ultimately worked. While Mac and the women went off to hood the Egyptian vultures and prod the honey badgers into their carrying cages, I unlocked the gate on the chain–link fence and stepped into the lion compound, Chuy right beside me with a coiled–up rope. Al and Al sat in the Olfputt, flexing their muscles and looking very small in the face: they wanted no part of this, and who could blame them?
I never liked darting the animals. Too risky. We were using a mixture of Telezol and Xylazine, and it worked like a charm – if you got the dosage right. Too much, and you had a dead animal on your hands; too little, and you ran the risk of becoming a dead animal yourself. I’d worked out the dosage as best I could under the conditions (duress, flooding, excitable women and a hysterical Mac, inundated kitchen, floating table, that sort of thing), and I figured I’d try half a dose for starters – enough to make them groggy, but not so much that they couldn’t swim behind the Olfputt and find their way through the open basement door to where dry accommodations, some hastily scattered straw and the freshly drowned carcass of an emu awaited them.
The water was waist–deep – did I mention that? – and slipping by at a pretty good clip. Plus there were the damned catfish crawling up on every horizontal surface in their little gift–wrapped packets of slime. And how did the lions feel about it? Pissed off. Definitely pissed off. They were hungry and tired and sick to death of being wet and cold and clambered over by fish that had no right to exist in this environment at all. Dandelion fixed his tan eyes on us and let out a belly–shaking roar of complaint from his perch atop the lion house.
‘All right, Chuy,’ I said, ‘I’m going to dart Dandy first, and when you see him go down on his haunches, fling that rope around him. That lasso, I mean. You can use it, right?’
’Sí, Mr. Ty, I can use, no hay problema.’ (Among his many former occupations, Chuy listed ‘bronco–buster’ and ‘vaquero.’ When he was in his twenties, before he came north, he’d worked in a Mexican rodeo, roping dogies, whatever they were – calves, I take it.) ‘No worries,’ he said now, grinning out of the wet mask of his face. The wind screamed, flapping the hood of the slicker against my elongated old man’s ears, and I could hear Lily harmonizing in the distance: oooo–whup, oooo–whup!
‘And if the other two come for us, I’m not going to dart them, so we’re just going to have to back out of the cage and lock the door, okay? They’re not all that fond of the water, so they’ll probably stay put – ’
‘That is what I am thinking también, Mr. Ty,’ Chuy said, wading forward with deep thrusts of his legs till he was twenty feet from the gate and maybe thirty from the lions. And they were roaring now, all three of them, ears flattened, lips pulled back, tails twitching, their eyes locked on Chuy as he whirled the lasso over his head in the wind and driving rain. ‘Yippee!’ he shouted. ‘Yippee–yi–ki–yay!’
I was worried, I admit it. I’m a worrier and cynic at heart, always have been – at least since Earth Forever! came into my life. Or before that even, when a stinking little half–inch wasp that couldn’t have weighed more than a quarter of an ounce took Jane away from me for good. I expect the worst, and I’ll have to say that my expectations have been abundantly fulfilled through the seventy–five years of shitstorms and bad luck that constitute my life to this point. At best I expected three drowned lions; at worst, I pictured Chuy with his limbs separated from his body and me with my intestines rearranged in a way that would have caused real consternation down at the emergency room. That’s why I had Philip Ratchiss’ Nitro Express slung over my shoulder in addition to the Palmer dart gun.
My hands were trembling as I sighted down the barrel of the dart gun (old age, palsy, the sake shakes, undiluted terror – you name it), and the first dart took off like a guided missile, streaking high over the lions, out of the pen and into the dense fabric of the wind–whipped sky. The lions roared, Chuy yippeed and yahooed and twirled the rope over his head. I took my bifocals off and wiped them on the handkerchief in my breast pocket, the only reasonably dry thing on me, and then I lined up a second shot with the tip of my nose spewing water like a fountain and my fingers befuddled and the catfish crawling up my pantlegs, and let it go out of desperation, frustration and something very much like hate – hate for the animals, for Mac, for the U.S. Weather Service and all the polluters and ravagers and industrialists who had brought me and Chuy and the lions to this absurd and humiliating moment in the history of interspecies relations.
There was a sound like the final blow in a pillow fight – a soft whump! and there it was, the dart, dangling from Dandelion’s flank like a – well, like a big yellow jacket. He turned and snapped at it, whirling round two or three times with a snarl more bewildered than fierce, and in the process inadvertently knocked Amaryllis off the roof and into the cold swirl of the muddy water. She didn’t like that. Didn’t like it at all. Thankfully, though, she didn’t take her displeasure out on Chuy – or me – but instead scrabbled back up on the roof of the enclosure and gave Dandy a swat that would have crushed the spine of a zebra or wildebeest (if such things existed), but only managed to operate in concert with the drug and knock him off his feet. That was when Chuy’s rope work came into play. He was a master, no doubt about it, the lasso snaking out, catching the wind and riding it in an elliptical trajectory right over Dandy’s head, where it came down soft as a snowflake.
The rest was easy. (I’m speaking relatively here, of course – relative to a week ago, when all I had to worry about was what I was going to read on the toilet and which can of soup to open for supper, it was the seventh circle of hell.) Chuy cinched the rope, waded back to me an
d stood at the open door of the enclosure to watch the result – and slam shut the door if anything went wrong. I backed up, the current snatching at my old man’s feet, the wind slamming at me in gust after gust, and slowly made my way back to the Olfputt, where I climbed into the back seat and fought the door closed. The two Als were up front, giving me the sort of look they reserved for anybody who got within five feet of Mac. They looked fierce and suspicious, puffed up like bullfrogs, the slabs of their shoulders rising titanically out of the black slickers Mac had provided them with. They also looked scared. ‘What now?’ the one at the wheel said.
I glanced over my shoulder to where Chuy, partially obscured by a scrim of wind–driven rain, was giving me the thumbs–up sign. A gust rocked the truck. ‘Put it in four–low,’ I said, still watching Chuy, ‘and start up the hill, nice and easy.’
The truck moved forward and the line fastened to the trailer hitch went taut, and in the next moment I saw the distant form of Dandelion pitch forward off the roof and plunge awkwardly into the water, all four paws spread like landing gear. For an instant, he was gone from sight, but then his head bobbed up and I could see his front paws churning – he was swimming! But the miracle didn’t end there. In the next moment, both the other lions followed suit, flopping into the water with looks of weary resignation and paddling right along with him, through the open gate and on up the hill behind the Olfputt. ‘Right up to the door!’ I shouted at Al. ‘Right on up to the door!’
Now, there are many forms of disaster that could have spun out of this – three full–grown, ill–tempered and half–starved African lions loose among the condos, and how big a check would Mac have to write then? – but the newborn river that had taken possession of Rancho Seco had split round Mac’s hill. His place was an island now, and though the cats could have swum off to wreak havoc of the worst and bloodiest sort, I really did think they would have the sense to come in out of the rain and settle down to the breast of feral emu we’d so thoughtfully provided for them. And that’s exactly what they did. I leaned out the back window and cut the rope, and Dandy, wobbly from the drug, had to sit down twice in the mud before he could follow his nose – and his two unencumbered companions – through the open door and into the vast recesses of Maclovio Pulchris’ paneled and carpeted basement. All that was left was to close and secure the door, and I had Al the First nose the Olfputt in over the flowerbeds and right up to the door, and then Al the Second jumped out and put his shoulder to it in a very definitive way. Then it was the planks and six–inch nails, and all three of us put our energy into that, even as Chuy, triumphant, staggered up to us with a four–foot grin. ‘Now we go for Lily, verdad, Mr. Ty?’