by T. C. Boyle
She had to. If only for her peace of mind.
(1987)
KING BEE
In the mail that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100% Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.
“Ken? What is it?”
Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”
He handed her the letter.
“My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”
It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats—all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession—but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.
“You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”
Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes—some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one—and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were—well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guia-nese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days—for a price, of course—but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies—twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds—and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.
They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.
“An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.
“No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”
“How old?” Pat said.
Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child—a boy—whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cade-martori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”
The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.
Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average—or above average—intelligence. He’s a boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens—or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.
“Does he behave?” Pat asked.
“Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost.
“Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again—so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow—Ken, Pat—let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents—they were your age, by the way—just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his finger—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony … poor little Tony comes home …”
Pat looked stunned. Ken reached out to squeeze her hand.
“He needs love, Pat,” Denteen said. “He has love to give. A lot of love.”
Ken looked at Pat. Pat looked at Ken.
“So,” Denteen said, “when would you like to meet him?”
They met him the following afternoon, and he seemed fine. A little shy, maybe, but fine. Super-polite, that’s what Pat thought. May I this and may I that, please, thank you, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. He was adorable. Big for his age—that was a surprise. They’d expected a lovable little urchin, the kind of kid Norman Rockwell might have portrayed in the barber’s chair atop a stack of phone books, but Anthony was big, already the size of a teenager—big-headed, big in the shoulders, and big in the rear. Tall too. At nine, he was already as tall as Pat and probably outweighed her. What won them over, though, was his smile. He turned his smile on them that first day in Denteen’s office—a blooming angelic smile that showed off his dimples and the perfection of his tiny white glistening teeth—and Pat felt something give way inside her. At the end of the meeting she hugged him to her breast.
The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—the months of the trial period. Anthony smiled at breakfast, at dinner, smiled when he helped Ken rake the leaves from the gutters or tidy up the yard, smiled in his sleep. He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished. The change was abrupt and it came without warning.
“Scooter,” Ken called to him one afternoon, “you want to help me take those old newspapers to the recycling center and then maybe stop in at Baskin and Robbins?”
Anthony was upstairs in his room, the room they’d decorated with posters of ballplayers and airplanes. He didn’t answer.
“Scooter?”
Silence.
Puzzled, Ken ascended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he became aware of an odd sound emanating from Anthony’s room—a low hum, as of an appliance kicking in. He paused to knock at the door and the sound began to take on resonance, to swell and shrink again, a thousand muted voices speaking in unison. “Anthony?” he called, pushing open the door.
Anthony was seated naked in the middle of his bed, wearing a set of headphones Ken had never seen before. The headphones were attached to a tape player the size of a suitcase. Ken had never seen the tape player before either. And the walls—gone were the dazzling sunstruck posters of Fernando Valenzuela, P-38s, and Mitsubishi Zeroes, replaced now by black-and-white photos of insects—torn, he saw, from library books. The books lay scattered across the floor, gutted, their spines broken.
For a long moment, Ken mer
ely stood there in the doorway, the sizzling pulse of that many-voiced hum leaking out of Anthony’s headphones to throb in his gut, his chest, his bones. It was as if he’d stumbled upon some ancient rite in the Australian Outback, as if he’d stepped out of his real life in the real world and into some cheap horror movie about demonic possession and people whose eyes lit up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Anthony was seated in the lotus position, his own eyes tightly closed. He didn’t seem to be aware of Ken. The buzzing was excruciating. After a moment, Ken backed out of the room and gently shut the door.
At dinner that evening, Anthony gave them their first taste of his why-don’t-you-get-off-my-back look, a look that was to become habitual. His hair stood up jaggedly, drawn up into needlelike points—he must have greased it, Ken realized—and he slouched as if there were an invisible piano strapped to his shoulders. Ken didn’t know where to begin—with the scowl, the nudity, the desecration of library books, the tape player and its mysterious origins (had he borrowed it—perhaps from school? a friend?). Pat knew nothing. She served chicken croquettes, biscuits with honey, and baked beans, Anthony’s favorite meal. She was at the stove, her back to them, when Ken cleared his throat.
“Anthony,” he said, “is there anything wrong? Anything you want to tell us?”
Anthony shot him a contemptuous look. He said nothing. Pat glanced over her shoulder.
“About the library books …”
“You were spying on me,” Anthony snarled.
Pat turned away from the stove, stirring spoon in hand. “What do you mean? Ken? What’s this all about?”
“I wasn’t spying, I—” Ken faltered. He felt the anger rising in him. “All right,” he said, “where’d you get the tape player?”
Anthony wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked past Ken to his adoptive mother. “I stole it,” he said.
Suddenly Ken was on his feet. “Stole it?” he roared. “Don’t you know what that means, library books and now, now stealing?”
Anthony was a statue, big-headed and serene. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.
The scene at the library was humiliating. Clearly, the books had been willfully destroyed. Mrs. Tutwillow was outraged. And no matter how hard Ken squeezed his arm, Anthony remained pokerfaced and unrepentant. “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he sneered, “because I’m not.” Ken gave her a check for $112.32, to cover the cost of replacing the books, plus shipping and handling. At Steve’s Stereo Shoppe, the man behind the counter—Steve, presumably—agreed not to press charges, but he had a real problem with offering the returned unit to the public as new goods, if Ken knew what he meant. Since he’d have to sell it used now, he wondered if Ken had the $87.50 it was going to cost him to mark it down. Of course, if Ken didn’t want to cooperate, he’d have no recourse but to report the incident to the police. Ken cooperated.
At home, after he’d ripped the offending photos from the walls and sent Anthony to his room, he phoned Denteen. “Ken, listen. I know you’re upset,” Den-teen crooned, his voice as soothing as a shot of whiskey, “but the kid’s life has been real hell, believe me, and you’ve got to realize that he’s going to need some time to adjust.” He paused. “Why don’t you get him a dog or something?”
“A dog?”
“Yeah. Something for him to be responsible for for a change. He’s been a ward—I mean, an adoptee—all this time, with people caring for him, and maybe it’s that he feels like a burden or something. With a dog or a cat he could do the giving.”
A dog. The idea of it sprang to sudden life and Ken was a boy himself again, roaming the hills and stubble fields of Wisconsin, Skippy at his side. A dog. Yes. Of course.
“And listen,” Denteen was saying, “if you think you’re going to need professional help with this, the man to go to is Maurice Barebaum. He’s one of the top child psychologists in the state, if not the country.” There was a hiss of shuffling papers, the flap of Rolodex cards. “I’ve got his number right here.”
“I don’t want a dog,” Anthony insisted, and he gave them a strained, histrionic look.
We’re onstage, Ken was thinking, that’s what it is. He looked at Pat, seated on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and then at his son, this stranger with the staved-in eyes and tallowy arms who’d somehow won the role.
“But it would be so nice,” Pat said, drawing a picture in the air, “you’d have a little friend.”
Anthony was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red and blue letters that spelled out MEGADETH. On the reverse was the full-color representation of a stupendous bumblebee. “Oh, come off it, Pat,” he sang, a keening edge to his voice, “that’s so stupid. Dogs are so slobbery and shitty.”
“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, exce
pt 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.