by Drew Ford
“See this?” he said.
“Yeah. Looks like water.”
“It is with two important differences: 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 was five gallons of it. I’ve got a regular little distillery running down there, Howie.” He was grinning, and now the grin broadened. “Water’s all it is, but it’s the god-damnedest popskull the human race has ever seen, just the same.”
“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 just manage to hold itself together for another six months, it’ll hold itself together for all time.”
He held up 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 Homo sapiens falls prey.”
“Cancer?”
“Nope,” Bobby said. “War. Where’s your bathroom? My back teeth are floating.”
When he came back he had not only turned the Mumford T-shirt right side 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 a while, then raked his fingers through his long, coarsely blond shag. He looked at the two glass boxes and pronounced the bees and wasps back to normal. “Not that a wasps’ nest ever approaches anything closely resembling ‘normal,’ Howie. Wasps are societal insects, like bees and ants. But unlike bees, which are almost sane, and ants, which have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are lunatics.” He smiled. “Like people.” He took the top off the glass 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 Mr. Wizard demonstration for later. I mean, my landlord’s a real pussycat, but the super’s this big bulldyke 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 shit, 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, rushing 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 documentaries. It’s nothing very special, but people have got a set of 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 glass. 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 footy 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 People’s from there.”
“I think you ought to get your hand out of there,” 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 after he bopped out, bringing them down one by one, like escapees from some old prison movie. But none of them had . . . at least so far.
“Relax, Howie. You ever see a bee sting a flower? Or even hear of it?”
“You don’t look like a flower.”
He laughed. “Shit, 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 at least thirty-seven other dioxins.”
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 off. I saw him wince once more just before he got the last of them off and eased my mind considerably by replacing the lid on the glass 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 pocket and went over to my desk. He moved the pile of manuscripts 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 wood.
“Writin’ anything good, Bow-Wow?” he asked casually, and I felt the hair stir on the back of my neck. When was the last time he’d called me Bow-Wow? When he was four? Six? He was working carefully on his left hand with the tweezers. I saw him extract a tiny something that looked a little like a nostril hair and place it in my ashtray.
“Piece on art forgery for Vanity Fair. Bobby, what in hell are you up to this time?”
“You want to pull the other one for me?” he asked, offering me the tweezers, his right hand, and an apologetic smile. “I keep thinking if I’m so goddamn smart I ought to be ambidextrous, but my left hand has still got an I.Q. of about six.”
Same old Bobby.
I sat down beside him, took the tweezers, and pulled the bee stinger out of the red swelling near what in his case should have been called the Bracelets of Doom; and while I did it he told me about the difference between bees and wasps, the difference between the water in La Plata and the water in New York, and how, goddamn! everything was going to be all right with his water and a little help from me.
And oh, shit, I ended up running at the football while my laughing, wildly intelligent brother held it one last time.
“Bees don’t sting unless they have to, because it kills them,” Bobby said matter-of-factly. “You remember that time in North Conway when you said we kept killing each other because of original sin?”
“Yes. Hold still.”
“Well, if there is such a thing, if there’s a God who could simultaneously love us enough to serve us His own Son on a cross and send us all on a rocket sled to hell just because one stupid bitch bit a bad apple, then the curse was just this: He made us like wasps instead of bees. Shit, Howie, what are you doing?”
“Hold still and I’ll get it out. If you want to make a lot of big gestures, I’ll wait.”
“Okay,” he said, and after that he held relatively still while I extracted the stinger. “Bees are nature’s kamikaze pilots, Bow-Wow. Look in that glass box; you’ll see the two who stung me lying dead at the bottom. Their stingers are barbed, like fishhooks. They slide in easy. When they pull out, they disembowel themselves.”
“Gross,” I said, dropping the second stinger in the ashtray.
“It makes them particular, though.”
“I bet.”
“Wasps, on the other hand, have smooth stingers. They can belt you all they like. They use up the poison by the third or fourth shot, but they can go right on making holes if they like . . . and usually they do. Especially wall wasps. The kind I’ve got over there. You gotta sedate ’em.
Stuff called Noxon. It must give ’em a hell of a hangover because they wake up madder than ever.” He looked at me somberly, and for the first time I saw the dark brown wheels of weariness under his eyes and realized my kid brother was tired, almost tired to death, maybe.
“That’s why people go on fighting, Bow-Wow. On and on and on. We got smooth stingers. Now watch this.”
He got up, went over to his tote bag, rummaged in it, and came up with an eyedropper. He opened the mayonnaise jar, put the dropper in, and drew up a tiny bubble of his distilled Texas water.
When he took it over to the glass box with the wasps’ nest inside, I saw the top on this one was different—there was a tiny, plastic slide piece set into the top. With the wasps, he was taking no chances.
He squeezed the black bulb. Two drops of water fell onto the nest, making a momentary dark spot that disappeared almost at once. “Give it about three minutes,” he said.
“What—”
“No questions,” he said. “You’ll see. Three minutes.”
In that period he read my piece on art forgery . . . although it was already twenty pages long.
“Okay,” he said, putting the pages down. “That’s pretty good, man. You ought to read up on how Jay Gould furnished the parlor car of his private train with fake Manets—shit, that’s a riot—but it’s good. Watch.”
Before I really knew what he was up to—I was musing on how much Gould might have paid for the fake Manets—he had removed the cover of the glass box containing the wasps’ nest.
“Jesus, Bobby, quit it!” I yelled.
“Same old wimp,” Bobby laughed and pulled the nest, which was dull gray and about the size of a bowling ball, out of the box. He held it in his hands. Wasps flew out and lit on his arms, his cheeks, his forehead. One landed on my forearm. I slapped it, and it fell dead to the carpet. I was scared—I mean, really scared.
“Don’t kill ’em,” Bobby said. “You might as well be machine-gunning babies. They’re harmless, for Christ’s sake. That’s the point.” He tossed the nest from hand to hand like an overgrown softball. He lobbed it in the air. I watched, horrified, as wasps cruised the living room of my apartment like fighter planes.
Bobby lowered the nest carefully back into the box and sat down on my couch. He patted the place next to him, and I went over, nearly hypnotized. They were everywhere: on the rug, the ceiling, the drapes. Half a dozen of them were crawling across the screen of my Curtis-Mathis.
Before I could sit down, he brushed away a couple that were on the sofa cushion where my ass was aimed. They flew away quickly. They were all flying easily, crawling, moving fast. There was nothing drugged about their behavior. But as Bobby talked, they gradually found their way back to their spit-paper home, crawled over it, and eventually disappeared inside again through the hole in the top.
“I wasn’t the first one to get interested in Waco,” he said. “It just happens to be the biggest town in the funny little nonviolent section of what is, per capita, the most violent state in the Union. Texans love to shoot each other, Howie—I mean, it’s like a state hobby. Half the male population goes around armed. Saturday night in the Fort Worth bars is like a shooting gallery where you get to plonk away at drunks instead of clay ducks. There are more NRA-card carriers than there are Methodists. Not that Texas is the only place where people shoot each other or carve each other up with straight razors or stick their kids in the oven if they cry too long, you understand, but they sure do like their firearms.”
“Except in Waco,” I said.
“Oh, they like ’em there, too,” he said. “It’s just that they use ’em on each other a hell of a lot less often.”
Jesus. I just looked up at the clock and saw the time. It feels like about fifteen minutes, but it’s been almost an hour already. That happens to me sometimes when I’m running at white-hot speed, but I can’t allow myself to be seduced into these specifics. I feel as well as ever—no noticeable drying of the membranes in the throat, no groping for words, and as I glance back over what I’ve done, I see only the normal typos and strikeovers. But I can’t kid myself. I’ve got to hurry up. “Fiddledeedee,” said Scarlett, and all of that.
The nonviolent atmosphere of the Waco area had been noticed and investigated before, mostly by sociologists. Bobby said that when you fed enough statistical data on Waco and similar areas into a computer—population density, mean age, mean economic level, mean educational level, and dozens of other numbers—you got back a whopper of an anomaly. Scholarly papers are rarely jocular, but even so, several of the better than fifty Bobby read on the subject suggested ironically that maybe it was “something in the water.”
“I decided that maybe it was time to take the joke seriously,” Bobby said. “After all, there’s something in the water of a lot of places that prevents tooth decay. It’s called fluoride.”
He went to Waco accompanied by a trio of research assistants—two of these were sociology grad students, the other a full professor of geology who was on sabbatical. Within six months Bobby and the sociology guys had constructed a computer program that Bobby called the world’s only seismographic picture of a calmquake. He had a slightly rumpled printout in his tote. He gave it to me. I was looking at a series of forty concentric rings with a diameter of six miles each. Waco was in the eighth, ninth, and tenth rings.
“Now look at this,” he said, and put a transparent overlay on the printout. More rings; but in each one there was a number. Fortieth ring: 471. Thirty-ninth: 420. Thirty-eighth: 418. And so on. In a couple of places the numbers went up instead of down, but only in a couple (and only by a little).
“What are they?”
“Each number represents the incidence of violent crime in that particular circle,” Bobby said. “Murder, rape, assault and battery, even acts of vandalism. The computer assigns a number by a formula that takes the population density into account.” He tapped the twenty-seventh circle, which held the number 204, with his finger. “There’s less than nine hundred people in this whole area, for instance. The number indicates three or four cases of spouse abuse, a couple of barroom brawls, an act of animal cruelty—some senile farmer got pissed at a pig and hit him with a shovel—and one involuntary manslaughter.”
At the center of Bobby’s calmquake was the town of La Plata. To call it a sleepy little town seems more than fair. The numerical value assigned to La Plata was zero.
“So here it is,” Bobby said, leaning forward and rubbing his long hands together nervously. “Here’s this weird little sagebrush Garden of Eden. Here’s a community of fifteen thousand, twenty-four percent of which are people of mixed blood commonly called Indios. There’s a moccasin factory, a couple of little motor courts, a couple of scrub farms. That’s it for work. For play there’s four bars, a couple of dance halls where you can hear any kind of music you want as long as it sounds like George Jones, two drive-ins, and a bowling alley.” He paused and added, “There’s also a still. I didn’t know anybody made whiskey that good outside of Tennessee.”
In short (and it is now too late to be anything else), La Plata should have been a fertile breeding ground for the sort of casual violence you can read about in the police-blotter section of the local newspaper. Should have been, but wasn’t. There had been only one murder in La Plata during the five years previous to my brother’s arrival, two cases of assault, no rapes, no reported incidents of child abuse. There had been a number of armed robberies, but they had all been committed by transients . . . as the murder and one of the assaults had been. The local sheriff was a fat old Republican gent with a pretty fair Rodney Dangerfield imitation and what Bobby believed to be the preliminary symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. His only deputy was his nephew. Bobby told me that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Barney Fife on the old Andy Griffith show.
“Put those two guys in a Pennsylvania town similar to La Plata in every way but the geographical,” Bobby said, “and they would have been out on their asses fifteen years ago. But in
La Plata they’re gonna go on until they die . . . which they’ll probably do in their sleep.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Well, for the first week or so after we got our statistical shit together, we just sort of sat around and stared at each other,” Bobby said. “I mean, we were prepared for something, but nothing like this. I mean, Waco doesn’t prepare you for La Plata.”
He tapped the readout and the overlay, and I saw what he meant. The numbers in the last seven or eight circles dropped off radically: 83, 81, 70, 63, 40, 21, 5, 0.
“It was the classic Holmes situation of the dog that didn’t bark.” Bobby shifted restlessly and cracked his knuckles.
“Jesus, I hate it when you do that,” I said.
He smiled. “Sorry, Bow-Wow. Anyway, we started geological tests, then microscopic analysis of the water. I didn’t expect a hell of a lot; everyone in the area has got a well, and they get their water tested to make sure they’re not drinking borax or something. If there had been something readily apparent, it would have turned up a long time ago. So we went on to submicroscopy, and that was when we started to turn up some goddamn weird stuff.”
“What kind of weird stuff?”
“Breaks in chains of atoms, subdynamic electrical fluctuations, and some sort of unidentified protein. Water ain’t really H2O, you know—not when you add in the sulfides, iron, God knows what else happens to be in the aquifer of a given region. But La Plata water—you’d have to give it a string of letters like the ones after a professor emeritus’s name.” His eyes gleamed. “But the protein was the most interesting thing, Bow-Wow. So far as we know, it’s only found in one other place: the human brain.”
Uh-oh. It just arrived, between one swallow and the next: the throat dryness. Not much as yet but enough for me to break away and get a glass of ice water. I’ve got maybe forty minutes left. And oh, Jesus, there’s so much I want to tell! About the wasps’ nests they found with wasps that wouldn’t sting; about the fender bender Bobby and one of his assistants saw where the two drivers—both male, both drunk, and both about twenty-four (sociological bull moose, in other words)—got out, shook hands, and exchanged driver’s licenses and insurance information amicably. Well . . . one of them had insurance information; the other had no insurance at all. And of course, the guy without the insurance had clearly been at fault and had sustained about five hundred dollars’ less damage. But here’s this other guy, clapping him on the back and saying they can work it out.