Wild Child by T. C. Boyle Page A

sister Anita and thinking of palm trees and a fat glowing postcard sun that melted everything away in its wake. It never rained in Southern California, except that it had been raining all week, all month, and the snails, sliding along on their freeways of slime, loved it. They were everywhere, chewing holes in her nasturtiums, yellowing the tips of her Kaffir lilies and sucking at the bright orange flowers till the delicate petals turned brown and dropped off.
    Which was why she was out here this morning, early, before Doug was awake, while the mist clung like gauze to the ground and the L.A. Times landed with a resounding thump in the driveway, down on her hands and knees crushing snails with the garden trowel. She was a vegetarian, like her sister—they’d made a vow when they were in junior high—and she didn’t like to kill anything, not even the flies that gathered in fumbling flotillas on the windowsill, but this was different, this was a kind of war. The snails were an invasive species, the very same escargot people paid fifteen dollars a plate for in the restaurant, brought here at the turn of the last century by a French chef who was a little lax in keeping them in their pens or cages or wherever. They were destroying her plants, so she was destroying them. The tip of the trowel closed over the whorl of the shell and then she pressed down and was rewarded by an audible pop as the shell gave way. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see the naked dollop of meat trying to follow its probing antennae out of the ruin of its shell, and so she pressed down again until the thing was buried, each snail following the next to its grave.
    And then she looked up. And what she saw didn’t compute, not at first. Right there, right behind the wrought-iron fence Doug had put up to keep the deer out of her garden, there seemed to be a big cat watching her, a big striped cat the size of a pony—a tiger, that was what it was, a tiger from India with a head as wide across as the pewter platter she trucked out each Thanksgiving for the veggie cornucopia. She was startled—who wouldn’t be? She’d seen tigers at the zoo, on the Nature Channel, in cages at the circus, but not in her own backyard in Moorpark, California—might as well expect a polar bear in the Bahamas or a warthog at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It took her a minute, staring into the yellow eyes and the blistered snout from thirty feet away, her vision blurred, the hat slipping down over her eyebrows, before she thought to be afraid.
    “Doug,” she called in a low voice, as if he could hear her across the yard and through the pink stucco wall of the house, “Doug, Doug.”
    She wondered if she should move, come out of her crouch and wave her arms and shout—wasn’t that what you were supposed to do, wave your arms and shout? But the tiger, improbable as it was, didn’t lift its lip in a snarl or leap over the fence or drift away into a corner of her imagination. No, it only twitched its tail and lifted its ears at the sound of her voice.
    Two thousand miles away, under a sky of hammered granite, Anita Nordgarden was kicking across the frozen expanse of the drive, two bags of groceries clutched in her arms. She was on the midnight shift at the Page Center for Elder Care, midnight to eight a.m., and she’d had a few drinks after work with some of the other nurses, then sifted through the aisles at the supermarket for the things she’d forgotten she needed. Now, the wind in her face, her fingertips stinging with the cold, she wasn’t thinking very clearly, but if she was thinking anything, it was the fish, Lean Cuisine, pop it in the microwave, wash it down with two glasses of chardonnay and then read till she fell away into the deeps of her midday sleep that was all but indistinguishable from a coma. Or maybe she’d watch a movie, because she was exhausted and a movie required less effort than a book, though she’d seen each of the twenty-three