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.
Chapter 6
"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.
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 front of my big-screen TV.