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 Asshole, I think it was, up to New Orleans from there. Made about forty connections, but I swear to God it was the cab ride from LaGarbage that got ’em crazy. Second Avenue’s still got more potholes than the Bergenstrasse 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. “Shit, you think bees know what a flower looks like? Un-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 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 watch-pocket, and went over to my desk. He moved the pile of manuscript beside the Wang 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 cherry wood.
“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? Shit, 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.
“Piece on art forgery for Vanity Fair,” I said. “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 goddam smart I ought to be ambidextrous, but my left hand has still got an IQ 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 the Bracelets of Doom, and while I did it he told me about the differences between bees and wasps, the difference between the water in La Plata and the water in New York, and how, goddam! 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,” I said, “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. I couldn’t see the barbs, but I didn’t have a microscope.
“It makes them particular, though,” he said.
“I bet.”
“Wasps, on the other hand, have smooth stingers. They can shoot you up as many times as 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 more tired than I had ever seen him.
“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 eye-dropper. 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 it. I didn’t need him to draw me a picture: with the bees, he was perfectly willing to remove the whole 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 a little on how Jay Gould furnished the parlor-car of his private train with fake Manets, though—that’s a hoot.” He was removing the cover of the glass box containing the wasps’ nest as he spoke.
“Jesus, Bobby, cut the comedy!” 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 flew across to me and landed on my forearm. I slapped it and it fell dead to the carpet. I was scared—I mean really scared. My body was wired with adrenaline and I could feel my eyes trying to push their way out of their sockets.
“Don’t kill ’em,” Bobby said. “You might as well be killing babies, for all the harm they can do you. That’s the whole point.” He tossed the nest from hand to hand as if it were an overgrown softball. He lobbed it in the air. I watched, horrified, as wasps cruised the living room of my apartment like fighter planes on patrol.