The Wasp Eater - Softcover

WILLIAM LYCHACK is the author of the novel The Wasp Eater. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life.

The Wasp Eater

C H A P T E R O N E

She became a widow well before his father died. It was how she managed the grief made her strong, the man dead before he died, and the boy still just a boy, a little wisp of a kid, ten years old, an only child, end of story.
End of story, except she stood in his bedroom doorway that afternoon and said, Your father’s not going to be home for dinner tonight.” And Daniel turned to her. So?” So,” she said, I just thought you should know.” She stepped across the room and pushed closed the dresser drawers until they all lay even. The house seemed to hold its breath as she turned with her mouth pinched down and her chin trembling so fast she could not have been controlling it. The boy watched her and felt as if he’d swallowed a bit of metal a washer or a coin and someone was bringing it back up along his spine with a magnet.
Anna clicked her tongue and walked away, head up, out of the room. He listened to her run the water in the kitchen sink and imagined her looking out the window at the line of trees in the backyard, the bulbs already up with flowers, it being springtime and rainy and warm again now, the days growing longer. She crossed the hallway to the bathroom, and Daniel waited for the toilet to flush and refill, for her footsteps to pass his doorway and climb the stairs to the bedroom above. Daniel stood still and uneasy and waited below her, with nothing but his own breathing and swallowing.
The mantel clock in the living room ticked louder, then softer, then louder again. It chimed six and she returned to the kitchen, where he found her staring at the cuckoo clock on the wall. The pendulum a maple leaf hurried back and forth, and he caught her chin starting to tremble again. It was awful, and she turned away, and the clock struck and played Edelweiss” as the pinecone weights inched down the flowered wallpaper.

For dinner they drove across town to the old train station, a pizza parlor now. At one time this town had been big with factories and mills, textiles and lumber. It was the county seat, and its rail yards once ranked third in all New England for the volume of freight handled. The trains still pounded through at night, but no passenger trains stopped in Cargill Falls, Connecticut, any longer.
On the way home, Daniel sat quietly and held the pizza box on his lap and watched the cars, the department and grocery stores pass, the drugstore, the post office, the bank. There wasn’t a window he hadn’t helped his father clean, and Daniel caught glimpses of his mother’s Chevelle in the glass of the shop fronts as she drove home. The town looked dusty and grainy in the half light. On past the church, the cemetery, the brickwork mills along the river, the memorial bridge, his mother saying to smell the water, all chokeweed and carp.
He didn’t know what to say to this broken edge in her voice. She told him that she hated this place and their lives here and had half a mind to just pick up and leave, to never so much as look back. It made the hair on his arms go electric to hear her like this.
Hello?” she said. Am I talking to myself over here?” What do you want me to say, Mom?” He kept his eyes on the familiar turns of their neighborhood, everything prim and trim, their house like any of the others, a square of lawn, the trees ripe with birds. Inside the front door, the walls and furniture seemed to hold their breath. Daniel and his mother sat on the couch in front of the television news this was 1979, and the news was gas lines in California, Skylab falling, and then ads with gorillas and suitcases and plop-plop, fizz-fizz Anna just staring at the picture window, at the curtains hanging in long folds.
She moved a slice of pizza around in the box.
Mom,” he said, aren’t you hungry?” She shrugged and shook her head slightly.
So where’d you say Dad was so late again?” I don’t remember saying anyplace,” she said. Did I?” He couldn’t help but laugh a little a nervous bubble in his throat and he looked away at the carpet and the phone and the television and tried to chew the smile from his face.
She stood to leave.
What’s the matter?” he asked.
What d’you mean, What’s the matter?’” I don’t know it’s just you’re acting like a statue.” And what, pray tell, does a statue act like?” You’re just staring, I guess it’s creepy.”

He followed the sound of her that night as she paced the floorboards over him. Back and forth, the scuff of slippers almost endless over his ceiling. Her pacing became, eventually, a kind of patrol, and only the phone stopped her. It rang in the living room and she appeared in his doorway, her shadow bent large and long across the wall.
> We’re not home tonight,” she told him.
The phone kept ringing behind her ten, fifteen, and then twenty rings made it eternal. The bells hummed in his ears when they did end, at last. Anddddd from the hallway she told him to sleep, though he knew he’d never be able to fall asleep now. He lay in bed cold and afraid and still as a stone, his breathing shallow as he listened to her move upstairs.
Her voice sank down through the ceiling as she talked or sang to herself. Rain began to blow against the windows like sand, and he must have fallen in and out of sleep, because he’d sit up in bed in the dark and believe the front door had just flown open and that his father’s car waited idling in the drive.

In the morning the rain continued. Half asleep, Daniel rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling and the light fixture. The water stain was a map of the Great Lakes. Or it was the Indian on a nickel. Or a dinosaur fossil. In the ashy light he could either blur his eyes and fall back to sleep or else he could turn and watch the evergreen branches sway against the window.
He never woke all at once like his father did. His father could wake up like a shot, or so he said, but the boy woke slowly, layer by layer, like his mother. He would step out of bed and find himself in the bathroom and then at the end of the hall. Now he heard the faint sound of the shower upstairs and went up to their bedroom, where the bed had been stripped, the blankets and sheets piled on the floor, a pair of suitcases open on the dressers.
He’s not here,” she said from behind him.
She wore a robe and had a towel on her head like a turban, her face scoured and red. You’re not going to miss your bus now,” she said, are you?” Anna called in sick to the department store where she worked. She stayed home all morning, changed the locks, and packed her husband’s things into boxes and bags. She took everything out into the rain, hung his pants and shirts on the low branches of the trees out front, dragged trash bags over the grass, cartons of paper and .les to the curb.
Let the whole town drive by and see, she thought. What did she care? It wasn’t the waitress in bed with him; it was the shit-eating grin that made her insane, the way he couldn’t seem to wipe that smirk from his face.
Had they still lived in the saltbox by the river, she would have dropped everything into that slow brown water.
But here she could only put him out on the street for the garbage men to remove the next day. This was better, she told herself, a public decision was more real, more decisive.
A river would’ve just carried it all away. That was what rivers did they forgave.

Just another day at school for the boy, but the house he came home to seemed like a pocket turned inside out, more like the empty skin of an animal than the place he lived in and had left that morning. He felt ashamed by the clothes draped over the bushes, by the shoes in the grass, the boxes at the end of the drive, everything dark and soft with rain. If he could only have kept walking past this house, past this whole display of theirs, but he didn’t know where else he could go.
Daniel went around to the backyard and saw her through the storm door in the kitchen. She was never home at this time, but there she was, lifting the mop into the sink.
She seemed somehow undone her duster half opened, her hair uncurled, her hands pressing the braids of the mop under the running water. He opened the door and stepped slowly inside, his mother wiping her hands on her hips.
And why aren’t you at school?” she asked. She stood there and didn’t turn to him, just looked up at the ceiling until he answered.
It’s three-thirty, Mom.” So, you should be outside playing,” she said, shouldn’t you?” She took the mop from the sink and faced him, a black smudge across her nose. Well,” she said, you usually go play or something, don’t you?” It’s raining,” he told her.
So? Babe Ruth would’ve played through a little rain.” Babe Ruth?” Whoever,” she said.
He stared at her, and she swiped the mop around his shoes and told him to go away. He went to his room, closed his bedroom door behind him, and sat on the edge of the bed and waited and hoped that her shadow would come to the stripe of light under his door. But she never came to explain any of this to him.
Out through his side window he could see his father’s shirts and pants hanging in the trees. Daniel looked at the papers blown over the yard, at the other houses on the street, and then back at the shirts and pants, all of them like versions of the same man one hanging out there green, one brown, one blue. Daniel lifted open the window and screen and curled himself over the sill to the grass outside. He tore the clothes from the branches and brought the cold bundles up into his room, where he hung them in the closet to dry.

Closer to night, Daniel heard the growl of his father’s car on the street in front of the house. His mother shut off the television and checked the new locks and then hurried the boy upstairs to the attic. Pretend no one’s home,” she whispered, her breath so close he felt the words like cobwebs across his face. And downstairs, his father began to knock at the door, his car still idling at the curb.
C’mon, Anna,” he called, open up already it’s me.” She stood with the boy behind the gauze curtains of the attic window and listened as the man pounded and yelled himself hoarse. I could break this fricken place down,” he hollered. Goddammit, Anna!” He kicked the door and stepped into the yard, to the limp boxes near the street, where he was visible to them.
Anna stared down at Bob as though he was some trespasser, his foot on the hydrant as he lit a cigarette and rested, the car exhaust rising faint red around the taillights behind him. Daniel stared too and began to shiver from the damp and the chill and the way his father waited as lean as a ghost through the curtains. The rain paused and the other houses on the street began to darken. His father drew his jacket tight. Hey, Daniel,” he called and looked up at the house. I know you’re in there.” The boy reached his hand slowly to the glass, as if under a spell.
And she hissed to him, Don’t you dare.” Daniel dropped his hand and crouched by the window.
He gathered the husks of wasps and flies from the floor and held them in his fist and looked down and saw his father picking through the piles of letters and magazines outside.
Bob took the rest of his clothes from the sidewalk and laid them over the front seat of the car. He lifted garbage bags into the trunk, carried luggage and boxes to the back seat, took the buckets and window tools, the extension ladder, the paper bag full of things from his medicine cabinet , and between each trip he glanced up to the windows of the house.
Soon the man and his car disappeared into the long wash of streetlights and rain. Anna and Daniel started downstairs in the dark, the boy’s mother holding his hand and telling him to be careful as they went. They felt their way down the steps, and Daniel crushed the wasps in his hand and scattered the pieces behind him.
The storm picked up that night. At least he could blame the rain and thunder for his sleeplessness. In his mind his father kicked at the front door every time Daniel closed his eyes.
He first appeared to the boy like branches scratching at the screen of his bedroom window, but late in the night the man grew more and more insistent, until he actually stood under the eaves and tapped at the metal frame of the window, his face close to try to see inside the darkened room.
Out of bed, the boy lifted open the window to the sound of the rain, his father’s hand to the loose mesh of the screen. The man was soaked and shrunken down as he leaned up toward the boy. Hey there, bud,” he said, his voice sore. How’s it going?” The rain gusted through the screen, and Daniel didn’t move, the cold spray on the tops of his feet like sparks.
Lightning flickered in the clouds and the storm groaned over the house, the town, the trees and hills beyond.
C’mon now,” said the man, just gimme a hand with the screen.” Bob wiped the rain from his face and looked up at Daniel for a moment, and then he cocked his arm and hit the screen with the heel of his hand. He pulled back and punched the frame again, harder, jimmied it sideways out of the window and dropped it to the grass. He put his forearms on the sill and started to lift himself into the house, but Daniel pulled the window down on him, leaned his weight on the sash, and then locked it.
Bob fell back, his face contorted through the wet glass.
He stood there and blinked the rain out of his eyes, his head tilting to one side slightly, as if he Robert S. Cussler, forty-seven years old, this former marine, this self-made, self-commanding, self-everything sort of man as if he couldn’t believe what was happening either.
He raised his face to the wind and rain and bent to get the screen from the ground behind him. He tapped the grass cuttings from it and replaced the frame in the window as best he could, and then he just turned and disappeared into the woods that bordered the yard.
Daniel never told anyone that his father stood there that night in the rain. He never said how the man came back and kept coming back, how Bob would pull up to the house in broad daylight, how he’d waltz through the rooms when she was at work.
Mom, he wanted to say, I did like we did.
I hid.
I didn’t move, he almost told her. I didn’t dare. I just kept hiding.
That much of the story had words, and Daniel pictured the words crawling from his throat, half sprung from his mouth with clicking wings. But if he never talked about it, if he never opened his mouth, then maybe none of it had to have happened: his run to the attic, the quiet of the boxes and the dusty heat upstairs, his father’s footsteps in the kitchen, the man’s voice singing into the house for the boy.
Ding-dong,” he’d say through the rooms. Avon calling.” He’d go heavy and hard and deliberate, room to room to room, his legs as straight and sharp as scissors until he found the stairway to the attic.
What’s this?” said Bob. Not even a hello for your old man?” Daniel sat on a paint can at the window, his back curved, his chin on his knees, a line of broken wasps and beetles at his feet.
The man shook his head and came over to the window.
His dress boots had bronze zippers up the inside ankles and creases in the leather, dust in the creases, and he squatted next to Daniel and reached to open the curtain. The light wavered as the cloth moved.
C’mon now,” said the man, it’s not that bad, is it?” He looked at the side of the boy’s face and put his arm around his shoulder, Daniel hunching his back so that his father’s hand would slip off. Bob touched the floor to catch his balance and went to one knee, waited for his son to say something. But Daniel didn’t say a word.
His father stood and laughed and looked up at the peak of the roof, the dark beams that crossed like the ribs ...