Everything but the Squeal

5

It was still only ten-forty-five, but I felt like I'd been awake for weeks. The world, as seen through the gritty glass of a downtown phone booth, was briefly bright. Even down here, directly across the street from police headquarters in Parker Center, traffic was light. The Saturday before Easter Sunday is usually a nice, peaceful day. I dialed my own number and listened to my answering machine go through its usual rigmarole.

“Hey, Simeon,” Roxanne said, ever effervescent. I dated Roxanne occasionally, and now that Eleanor was in China I was seeing more of her than usual. “I have hidden eggs everywhere, and not even the big detective is going to find one of them. At least, not without a body search, which is a clue, I guess. What I mean is that I hope you haven't forgotten that you're supposed to be here tonight and that we're going to do eggs tomorrow morning. I'm tending bar at McGinty's until eleven, and I expect to see you there just before we close. If you're not, I've saved a dozen raw eggs and you'll find them in your bed when you get home. They'll be broken, like my heart. Be there, buster, and no excuses.” She hung up.

I'd forgotten all about it. For the tenth time I resolved to get an appointment book and write things down in it. Other people showed up where they were supposed to be. Appointment books had to be the secret. Eleanor's appointment book was thicker than the OxfordEnglishDictionary and a lot worse organized, and she was always where she was supposed to be. At the moment, unfortunately, she was supposed to be in China.

The second call was from my mother. “Well, Billy be damned,” she said, getting right to the point,` “if I'd known I was going to spend my life talking to a machine, I'd have given birth to a battery, too. At least you'd be grateful. And speaking of you, I'm sure you remember that you promised to come by tomorrow. I'm sure you know how much your father and I are looking forward to it. Bring Eleanor, if she's speaking to you.” I heard my father's voice in the background. “No,” my mother said, “it's that damned machine again.” Then there was a dial tone. That was how long it had been since I'd talked to my mother. Eleanor had left three weeks ago.

The machine had promised three messages, so I hung on, watching a little Mexican girl, decked prematurely in her Easter best, argue with her mother about something. Her plump brown sturdy legs beneath half a mile of white ruffled crinoline anchored themselves to the sidewalk as permanently as an Ice Age as she tugged her mother in the direction she wanted to go. In about eight years, she'd be the age of the girl on the slab.

“Mr. Grist?” It was a voice I didn't recognize. “This is Jane Sorrell. Something has happened. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I need to see you. Please come. I don't know what I'm going to do.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass of the telephone booth and watched the little Mexican girl, victorious, lead her mother down the street in the desired direction. Good for her. Somebody loved her.

To get to the hotel, I headed west on Olympic and then, after miles of stunted architecture and Korean neon signs, swung north on Doheny toward Beverly Hills. Alice was so sluggish and unresponsive that it felt as though she were reading my mind. I didn't want to see Mrs. Sorrell. I didn't want to see Mr. Sorrell. I wanted to go home and spend Easter with my mother and father and pretend that I sold aluminum siding or something that never rusted, never warped, and always looked shiny and new and hopeful. I didn't want anything to do with families that had rotted and turned brown at the edges like Annie's avocado-and-clam dip.

I was in a fine humor as I chugged up the driveway to the hotel. The clown who opened the driver's door, stuffed into a uniform that looked like something willed to him by the Philip Morris bellboy, didn't do much to raise my spirits.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a bright smile as he estimated my income and looked Alice over. It was the smile a talent agent saves for a client who isn't working. “We don't get many of these, this far north of the border. We'll be real sure to park her where we can keep an eye on her.”

“Park her on your chest,” I said, climbing out. “I sure hope you don't have to live on your tips.”

“I usually know what to expect,” he said. He aimed Alice toward some unmapped area of the parking lot, the part they reserve for Volkswagen vans with psychedelic designs painted on them.

Mrs. Sorrell hadn't given me her room number, so I had to go through the formality of finding a house phone. As always these days, they were located behind a bouquet of eight-foot flowers that looked like Venus's-flytraps bred to eat airplanes.

“Yeah?” said a new voice, a sullen, young-sounding voice that I'd never heard before. It could have been a girl or a prepubescent boy.

“Is Mrs. Sorrell there, please?” I asked, yanking upward on the frayed bootstraps of whatever residue of courtesy I had left.

“No,” the new voice said. Its owner hung up.

I resisted the urge to rip the phone out of the wall and feed it to the flowers, and once again requested the operator to connect me with the Sorrell suite.

“Listen,” I said the moment the phone was lifted on the other end. “I've had to endure a lot of things today, not the least of which was a parking attendant so snotty that he should blow his nose into a parachute, and if you hang up one more time I'm going home, and you're going to have to deal with your mother, who will undoubtedly remove your skin in one-inch strips when she learns you sent me away. Do you understand?”

There was no response.

I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw little orange dots. “Is she coming back?”

“Sooner than I'd like.”

“Fine. I'm in the lobby.”

“Well, lucky you.” It was a girl, no doubt about it. Boys don't learn to be that nasty until after their voices change.

“There's a bouquet here that wants to eat me,” I said. “It's already got one of my buttons.”

“Call me when it reaches your fly,” she said. But she didn't hang up.

“That's the problem. It's a button fly.”

She exhaled heavily, and I could imagine her rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, in the gesture of put-upon teenage girls everywhere. “I suppose you want to know our room number,” she said. “It's eleven.”

Number eleven was a pink stucco bungalow that squatted behind a hedge of birds of paradise that was obviously the pride and joy of a gardener who liked birds of paradise. I wondered where they'd found one. After I pressed the bell twelve or thirteen times I found myself looking at a trim little naiad of seventeen or so with the same pouty mouth that Aimee had pointed toward the camera in her yearbook pictures.

“Not bad,” she said appraisingly. “A little old, but not bad.”

She had her mother's careless, honey-colored hair, blue eyes, and the longest legs I'd ever seen, holding up a pair of creased white tennis shorts. I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. “Wait,” I said, “it's coming to me. Your name … it begins with an A and it's got more vowels than a Hawaiian road map. It's. . it's. . Adelle.”

“Fold your map and sit on it,” she said. “Adelle’s my older sister. I'm Aurora.” She gave me something that might have passed for a smile in a lockjaw ward. “My mother's expecting you?”

“Your father calls her Mommy. How come you don't?”

“I don't know,” she said. “It's a word I can't seem to wrap my mouth around.”

“So what do you usually call her?”

“You. That is, when we're speaking.”

“As long as she's gone, let me ask you some questions.”

“Why should I?”

“Because your sister has gone thataway. Because she could be in some very deep trouble.” She didn't drop to her knees or cry out helplessly, so I said, “Where is your mother, anyway?”

“Drinking,” she said. “Me too.”

She opened the door and I stepped into a carpet so deep that I nearly stumbled. The room was furnished in rattan and tropical prints. Palm trees waved balmily at me from the upholstery. There was a definite bite of whiskey in the air.

“You started without me,” I said as she sat down on one end of a couch that looked like a great place to catch yellow fever, folded those legs, and picked up a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Even with her legs crossed, her knees were perfect. Not a knobby patella or a skateboard scar in sight. Aurora slugged back an inch or so and handed the bottle to me, a challenge in her blue eyes. My mouth tasted like formaldehyde, so I took it. “Let's see if we can finish together,” she said as I tilted it to my lips and drank.

It was like drinking smoke. I lowered it to take a breath, feeling something hot and red and alive burrowing down through the center of my chest, like an animated floor plan of hell. You Are Here, said the sign that had been posted at my mouth.

She reached out for the bottle. “Uh-uh,” I said, pulling it away. “You can lose a hand that way.” I drank again and then handed her the bottle. She tilted it upward and made a gurgling sound. When a girl looks good with a bottle of whiskey in her mouth, it's time to be careful.

“Banzai,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her wrist. “The divine wind, right?”

“What's the divine wind?” I asked, taking the bottle back and drinking. Her eyes watched the level of the whiskey as I drank. With every gulp the girl on the slab grew smaller and farther away.

“I don't know,” she said. “Those retards who flew their airplanes into the sides of aircraft carriers or whatever. They were the divine wind or something like that.” She reached out a brown hand and grasped the bottle and chugged at it. A flush came into her cheeks.

“Kamikaze,” I said as the penny dropped. “Kamikaze, the divine wind.”

“Yeah,” she said, eyeing me over the mouth of the bottle, which was considerably emptier than it had been a moment ago. “What I want to know, when those guys finally got their orders and learned that they were supposed to go out and never come back, what I want to know is how come none of them ever said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? ”

“The emperor was daddy,” I said. A wisp of pale hair hung over her brow, and I leaned forward and brushed it back. She didn't move away from me, so I sublimated the next impulse and took the bottle from her hand and drank. “It was an ancestral society. They did what daddy said they should do.”

“Hey, you,” she said, her blue eyes level. “You're talking to me like I'm an adult now. Before, you talked to me like I was a kid.”

“Before?” Before, as far as I was concerned, was the morgue.

“On the phone. Strips of skin, you talked about. Would you have said anything like that to an adult?”

“Um,” I said.

“If adults talked to each other the way they talk to kids, what do you think would happen?” She retrieved the bottle and put away a slug that would have elicited cries of admiration on skid row.

I thought about it. “The homicide rate would zoom.”

“The title of WarandPeace would be WarandWar,” she said.

“The neon signs at the corners,” I said, “would read DON'T WALK, STUPID.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I'd like to kidnap an adult and tie him up in the cellar and talk to him like he's a kid until he dies.”

“How does anybody grow up?” I asked rhetorically.

She hoisted the whiskey and swallowed. “Don't ask me,” she said. “I haven't done it yet. Bass-that's a fish, and I learned this in biology-bass parents spend days guarding the hole where their eggs have been laid. All they care about in the whole world is guarding those eggs. They drive away anything that comes close, no matter how big it is. Even snapping turtles, the ones that could take your thumb off like macaroni. They don't even take a break to eat. For all I know, they don't go to the john.”

She took a more moderate sip. “Finally,” she continued, “after four or five days, the eggs hatch. By then the parents are ravenous. When the baby bass swim up out of the hole, their mommy and daddy eat them. Just snap them up as fast as they can. So what's the difference between bass parents and human parents?”

“I give up.”

“Bass parents eat the child all at once,” she said. “Human parents take years.”

“Some bass babies survive,” I said. “If they didn't, there wouldn't be any more bass.”

“So do some human babies,” she said. “The ones who manage to swim away before they get eaten.”

“Let's make a deal,” I said.

“What?”

“I ask you questions about your family, questions about Aimee. You answer them.”

She examined the level of the whiskey in the bottle, swinging her upper shin back and forth. It shone as if it had been polished. “Some deal,” she said. “Why don't you wait for my mother?”

“You didn't let me finish. You get to talk to me as if I were a kid and you were an adult.”

Abruptly she stopped swinging her leg and banged the bottle down onto the table. “Don't be idiotic,” she said.

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

She flicked the bottle with a fingernail and I saw her mother snapping her nail against the edges of the Polaroids. “Aren't you listening?” she demanded. “How many times do I have to ask you? What's the matter, you got potatoes in your ears?”

“Oh,” I said, “right. Did you have any idea Aimee was going to run away?”

“What a stupid question. Do you think I can read minds?”

“Did she ever say anything about it?”

“Oh, come on. Think for a change, would you? No, she didn't.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“That's none of your business.” She raised the bottle and drank, and I watched her delicate throat work as she swallowed. “No,” she said, wiping her lips again, “she didn't. Jesus, stupid, she's only twelve.”

“Thirteen, I think.”

“Christ on a crutch, what's that to me? You think I can remember a single year? Twelve, thirteen, what's the difference? I got things on my mind, you know?”

“The deal,” I said, taking the bottle. “Remember?”

She gave me a narrow smile. “Just getting the flow going,” she said.

“So no boyfriends?”

“Aimee doesn't have time for boys. She's going to be a movie star. Don't you know anything?”

“Were your parents brutal to her?” There was no other way to ask the question.

“Hey,” she said, “we do the best we can. And by the way, did I tell you that I'm getting tired of the sound of your voice?”

“Did they hit her?”

“They didn't have to.” She made a face. “Have you got a cigarette?”

“I don't smoke.”

“Then what good are you?”

“Not much.”

“What kind of kid are you, anyway? Kids talk back.”

“Okay,” I said lamely. “Stick it in your ear.”

“It's no fun if you don't talk back.” She sounded plaintive.

“It isn't much fun even if I do.”

Aurora put a hand beneath the cushion of the couch and pulled out a slightly crushed pack of Marlboro Lights. “I guess it isn't,” she said. Her shoulders sagged. “So why do they do it?”

“They don't know what else to do. They feel like kids themselves and they feel like they've got to hide it. Maybe they're afraid their kids will get frightened if Mommy and Daddy don't act like they know everything. It's probably easier for the fathers. At least their voices change. Mothers have it rougher. They always sound squeaky.”

“Says you,” Aurora said, lighting her cigarette. “My mother could handle my father, his father, and all his brothers without losing her place in the Ladies'HomeJournal.” She blew a cloud of smoke at me. “So, game over. What do you want to know?”

“What did Aimee run away from?”

“Well,” she said, puffing away. “Kansas City, for one thing.”

“Not enough,” I said. “You said they never beat her.”

“They don't have to beat us,” she said. “They can love us to death.” The right side of her mouth, the upwardly tilted, kissable side, turned up even farther. Her brown skin gleamed.

“That's not really fair,” I said. “It's a cheap shot.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just for argument, let's say you're all right. I'll tell you an Aimee story. Just one out of hundreds.”

“Shoot,” I said, putting the bottle out of reach.

“She was eight, right? I mean, we're talking about a time of life when anything can kill you. Bad breath, ugly shoes. Buttercups are tough guys compared to an eight-year-old girl.” She looked for the bottle, and I gave up and handed it to her.

“It was Halloween,” she said. “Aimee wanted to be a princess. Well, I mean, who doesn't? She'd been asking for weeks for a princess costume to wear to this big party, this absolutely gigantic eight-year-olds' party, and the guy she had a crush on had even asked her to go with him. No prince was ever better-looking to Cinderella than this little eight-year-old creep-Jesus, his name was Arthur-was to Aimee. And Arthur, the wonderful Arthur, all of four feet tall, had asked Aimee to go to the party.”

She lifted the bottle to her lips.

“You know what my father does for a living?” she asked when she'd finished swallowing.

“No,” I said, realizing that I hadn't asked.

“He's a pork packer. ‘Everything but the squeal,’ that's his company's motto. When he's finished, that pig is gone. He was the first pork packer to advertise on the sides of barns. Farmer Al, he calls himself. To listen to his ads, you'd think Farmer Al owned every pig in America.” She licked a drop of whiskey from her lower lip. “For all I know, he does.”

I waited. “So?” I finally asked.

“So when Aimee goes upstairs to get into her costume, it's a pig costume. He can advertise on barns, so why not on his daughter? It was in a big cardboard box, and when she opened it, it was a bright pink pig's costume made out of rubber. It said ‘Farmer Al, the Pig's Best Friend’ on the side. Aimee took it out of the box and then sat on the floor, which people in our house just don't do, and started crying. She'd wanted a princess costume. Then, I'll give her credit, she got mad. She was still fighting with my parents when her date's father rang the doorbell.”

“Holy Jesus,” I said.

“So she didn't have any choice. She put on the costume, the fat little pink body with the sign on it and the little curlicue tail sticking out of its rear, and the pink rubber mask, and she walked down the stairs. I still don't know how she forced herself to walk down those stairs. I could hear her sobbing from the landing, where I was, but she had this pig mask on, you know? Nobody could see the tears. And down at the bottom of the stairs her date was waiting. He was dressed as a prince. Of course he was dressed as a prince. He had this dumb little sword at his side and this stupid little cape, and as he saw Aimee come down the stairs, his face dropped, and then, because he was a gentleman even at his age, he dredged up a smile. I'm still amazed that Aimee didn't die on the spot when she saw that smile.

“And they went off together, him smiling bravely, the prince who had chosen a pig, and her crying until she must have been soaked inside that rubber costume, and she won first prize at the party. All the other little girls were princesses, except the few who were ballerinas. And she came home with this big fat vulgar brass trophy, and my dad said, ‘See? What was all the fuss about?’ And to this day he doesn't understand why she threw the trophy through the picture window in the living room. He still doesn't know what he did to her.” She remembered her cigarette and stared at it as though she'd never seen it before.

“He thinks he's her best friend,” I said.

“There you are,” she said. “Childhood is so much fun.”

“Did that kind of thing happen often?”

“How often does it have to happen? It's not like they were belting us or hanging us up by our thumbs all the time. They've both just forgotten completely what it's like to be a kid. They take family votes to settle things, but their votes count for more than ours do. We're supposed to be little adults about it when they outvote us, two to four. Well, fuck that, we're not little adults. Aimee's still a baby. And two against four isn't a majority. Kids have a sense of justice, and you can't screw with it.”

I retrieved the bottle and knocked back a swig. “Did you ever run away?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Aimee had all the guts,” she said.

“Has,” I said. Aurora looked at me, stricken by what she'd said.

The knob on the front door turned, and I snatched the cigarette away from her so that I was holding both the Marlboro and the bottle when Mrs. Sorrell came into the room.

“Rory,” she said in a voice that was already furred by drink, “what in the world are you doing?”

Rory settled back onto the couch and crossed her arms. “I'm watching Mr. What's-his-name here drink and smoke,” she said. “Just honing the skills I picked up at home.”

Her mother swatted away some invisible gnats in front of her. “Well,” she said, “go into the other room.”

“Hey, don't worry,” Rory said, glancing at me. “I've got potatoes in my ears.”

“Is that supposed to be funny, miss?” Mrs. Sorrell said. “Don't you think I've got enough troubles without my own daughter turning into Henny Youngman?”

“Henny who?” Rory asked in honest bewilderment.

“Never you mind. Just make yourself scarce.”

“Oink,” Rory said, looking back at me as she stood up. Her elegant legs, brown below the white shorts, twinkled at me as though they had been dusted with Tinker Bell's goofus sparkles as she walked away. “Oink, oink,” she said. “Everything but the squeal.”

“What have you been telling him?” her mother demanded.

“Oh, Mother,” Rory said. “The truth will out.” She gave me another glance, walked very slowly to the door to what I supposed was the bedroom, and pulled it shut softly behind her. Mrs. Sorrell watched the door for a moment as though she expected it to open again, and then shook her head.

“We shouldn't have brought her,” she said, “but we were afraid to leave her alone, after, well, after Aimee. And it's Easter vacation and she wanted to see L.A. And, I don't know, I thought if we found Aimee she might be more willing to come home if Rory were with us. If we found Aimee,” she added bitterly. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, stretching the skin tight over the fine bones of her face, and I could see Rory's face peeking out at me through her mother's. “So I'm drinking,” she said. “The one thing I shouldn't be doing.”

She was wearing a white blouse with little red cherries embroidered on the collar and a pair of navy-blue slacks with big safari-style pockets. There were three long scratches on her forehead from where she'd raked it with her nails, red, angry parallel lines. Hers wasn't the kind of face that should have had scratches on it. They made her look younger and softer than her daughter.

“Well,” I said, hoisting the bottle, “at least you're not drinking alone.”

“Put it down,” she said in a tone that brooked no discussion. “One of us has to be clear-headed. I have something to show you, but first I have to know if you've learned anything.”

“Not much,” I said. I wasn't going to tell her about the girl on the slab and the burn in her navel. Not until I had to, at any rate. “I've been on the street for four days but I haven't found anyone who can put her there with certainty. That's where she was, though. There's a whole community of them out there.”

“She's not there anymore,” she said. “Come out on the terrace. I don't want Rory listening through the door.”

I put down the bottle as she crossed the room to a big sliding glass door and pushed it open. I couldn't figure out what to do with the cigarette, so I carried it out onto the terrace and crushed it underfoot.

The terrace was enclosed by ten-foot pink walls and overgrown vegetation. A hummingbird that had been feeding on a big leathery copadeoro gave us an indignant midair stare and thrummed off over the wall.

“I hate those things,” she said vaguely. “They're neither birds nor insects. They're like leftovers from some time when lizards flew and snakes swam. I always think they'll have dandruff.”

I like hummingbirds, but I kept quiet. Mrs. Sorrell fished in the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a piece of paper. “We have to go home,” she said wearily. “I guess I knew this was going to happen. I just hoped we'd find her before it did.” I put out a hand and she put the paper into it. Then she sank onto a chaise and crossed her ankles, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. I opened the paper.

Same kind of paper, same dot-matrix printer as before. GET $20,000, it said, all in caps. BE HOME TUESDAY AFTERNOON. I'LL CALL.

I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach. “When did this arrive?”

“Here? Today. It got to Kansas City yesterday. The maid sends my mail out every day, Federal Express.”

“Has he seen it?”

“He went home yesterday. I made him. I was worried about his heart.”

“You're going to have to tell him now.”

She looked up at me. “The hell I am,” she said.

“But the money.”

She lifted one hand from her lap and waved it away. “I've got money of my own,” she said. “I'm richer than Daddy will ever be.”

“You'll get the money, of course.”

“Certainly I will. She's my little girl.” She blinked twice, very quickly, and then drew both hands into fists. “The question,” she said, after a moment, “is what you'll be doing.”

“I've got two places to go today,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “One of them, I'm not so sure about. I'll get something at the other one.”

She looked back down at her lap, at the two sharp little fists and the expanse of navy-blue cloth drawn tight over her childbearing hips. “Please,” she said in a very small voice, “see that you do.”