Everything but the Squeal

8

Easter Sunday was ninety minutes away as I lurched through the front door of the Red Dog into the drizzle and aimed myself unsteadily east, looking for Alice. As far as Hollywood Boulevard was concerned, it was just another Saturday night.

The Boulevard was bumper-to-bumper, and the sidewalks were packed wall-to-curb. Neon made little zetz sounds overhead. Drum machines accompanied amplified grunts from the rolled-down windows of wet cars jammed full of kids. The street and the sidewalk were slick with mist. A cop's blue and red lights flashed ahead of me and two patrolmen, one of them a patrolwoman, braced a couple of sagging Mexicans against the side of their dented Toyota. This was what we'd come to: a female patrolman under artificial daylight frisking a stoned Mexican against a Japanese car to the beat of synthesized music. The future had arrived while I wasn't looking.

My head was turned back, my eyes on Jack's, when I stepped up onto the curb and bumped into somebody who was very hard. “Excuse me,” I said to whoever it was, and faced front to find myself looking at a phone kiosk. A skinny girl about Aimee Sorrell's age giggled wisely and said to her friend, “Scope him out. Talking to a pay phone.”

“That's what they're for,” I said with great precision. “They're less interesting than talking to you, but that's what they're for.” The girls looked at each other uncertainly. I attempted courtliness. “Does either of you have a breathalyzer?”

“No,” the friend said. “We don't.” She said it very slowly, as though she were talking to a tourist from very far away, someone with several heads and suction cups at the tips of his fingers. She wore a fringed buckskin jacket that had probably been her father's pride and joy in the heyday of the Buffalo Springfield.

“Pity,” I said. “But you may go.” Congratulating myself on my gallantry, I picked up the phone and fumbled around in my pocket for a quarter. “Hello, pay phone,” I said.

Something touched the center of my back, and I snapped around. The skinny one had stepped back but the fresh-faced friend in the buckskin jacket stood her ground, looking up at me with clear, brave eyes. “Um,” she said, “you okay?”

To my bewilderment, my eyes filled with tears. “I'm fine,” I said. “What the hell are you doing on this street?”

“Nothing,” the friend said. “You know, just messing around. What's the matter with you?”

“The human condition,” I said, for want of anything else.

“Well,” the girl in the buckskin said, “as long as it's nothing serious.” She took her friend's arm and led her away from me.

“He talks to phones,” the skinny one hissed. “Leave him alone.”

“Chill out, Tabitha,” the friend said, “relax, would you?”

“Tabitha’s right,” I called after them. “Leave me alone. And get off the street. Here there be monsters.”

“You're the one who's monstered,” Tabitha said. Having gotten in the last word, something she probably never did at home, she led her friend away. The friend turned back to look at me once and then both of them floated into the crowd.

Since I had a phone in my hand, I dropped the quarter and called my number. The machine happily played back two hang-ups while I rested my forehead against the cold metal of the kiosk. The third call wasn't a hang-up.

“Damn you,” a girl's voice said. “Don't you ever go home? Get over here right now, my mother's acting crazy and I don't blame her, considering what I found in her purse. Oh, yeah, this is Aurora Sorrell, and you know where I am.”

When I stepped out of the kiosk the drizzle hit me in the face, but I didn't need it. I was as sober as Walter Cronkite. I sprinted for Alice, and people looked after me, hoping I might be something they'd see tomorrow on the news.

“Well, what a treat,” Aurora said as she opened the door to the bungalow. “So glad you could find the time.” Her mother was nowhere in sight.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Asleep. And it took long enough for you to get here.”

“Honey,” I said, “I've been working.” She started to bridle, and I said, “Sorry, sorry, not ‘honey.’ Aurora. Miss Sorrell, if you like. I've been looking for Aimee.”

“I've been calling you for hours.” She stepped back to let me in. She was wearing a long white shirt that looked like it belonged to her father, and her legs were bare, as they'd been created to be. There were weepy little smudges under her eyes.

“What's happened? Can she get up to talk to me?”

“She took a sleeper,” Aurora said. “She never takes a sleeper. She doesn't even take an aspirin. This is a woman who gets her teeth drilled without getting put out. It was one of my father's. He never packs right, you know what I mean? He left his whole overnight case here, razor and everything. I don't know how he stays in business.” She turned her back to me and walked to the couch. Her shoulders were as straight as a T square and she moved as though she would break if she bumped into anything. When she sat down she crossed her long brown legs and said, “I hope you're good.”

“I'm as good as I can be,” I said, following. “What's happened?”

She pulled out the crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights and lit one, avoiding my eyes. “We've heard from Aimee,” she said, fanning the smoke away with one hand. She made a sound that was midway between a sneeze and a laugh. ” ‘Heard’ is the word, all right. My, oh my, have we heard from Aimee.”

“What are we talking about?” I said. “What do you mean, you've heard from Aimee?”

“I didn't believe it,” she said, drawing on the cigarette. “I didn't believe anything was wrong. They always worried more about Aimee than they did about me. Aimee's the baby. Aimee's the last thing left between my mother and menopause. Aimee's the pot of gold at the end of the hairbow. Sibling rivalry and then some.”

“Stop acting like Tallulah Bankhead and tell me what happened.”

She closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again. She was drunker than I was. “Who's Tallulah Bankhead?” she asked.

“A dangerous amphibian,” I said. “Aurora. Tell me what happened.”

Her chin crumpled up like aluminum foil and she dropped her head. Two wet spots fell onto the brown skin of her thigh and glistened up at me. Without having any idea what I was doing, I reached out and brushed them away. Her hair hung forward, masking her face.

“My mother's purse,” she said in a muffled voice. “Over there, near the chair. Can you get it, please?”

Acting on automatic pilot, I got the purse and came back to the couch. I put the purse on the coffee table. “And?” I asked.

She took a shaky drag off the cigarette. “And open it, stupid,” she said without looking up. “It's right on top.”

I pulled the purse open and found myself looking at more stuff than the average man packs when he's going abroad for the rest of his life. “You've got to give me a hint,” I said. “This is King Tut's tomb. This is a time capsule. Anybody who finds this purse a thousand years from now will know all there is to know about Western civilization.”

“Western civilization is a joke,” she said. “There's no such thing as civilization. There's just table manners.”

She grabbed the purse and dug into it. “You want to see civilization?” she asked in a strangled tone. “You want to hear civilization?” She pulled out the little tape recorder and a cassette and fumbled around with them, trying to insert the tape into the player.

“I've heard this,” I said.

“Just shut up. I'm so damned sick of people who know what's going to happen next. You don't know which way your rear end is pointed,” she said, snapping the cassette player shut with a nasty little click. “Not that anyone cares.”

“Slow down,” I said. I touched her hand. “And before you play that thing, give me a drink.”

She tilted her face toward me. It was wet and shiny. “Good idea,” she said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand like she was trying to rub off a tattoo. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, reaching to the floor behind her and coming up with a bottle. “We're both just kids.”

“Who?”

She drank deeply. She'd graduated to cognac. “Everybody,” she said, passing the bottle. “Aimee and me. You and me. Why would anyone think you could find anything? My mother and me. She's not so old either, you know.” Her face wrinkled and she collapsed backward onto the couch. “Ohhhh, foooey” she wailed, covering her eyes with a forearm. “Fooey, fooey, fooey.”

The cognac was rawer than scraped bark. I had to swallow twice to make sure it would stay down, and even then it reached up with little fingers of fume to chin itself on my uvula. After it subsided and went about the business of lighting up my stomach, I leaned forward and pressed the button that made the little black machine play whatever it was that needed playing.

There was nothing. Just a hiss like a long-distance phone wire. Aurora made a little choking sound and waved at the machine, and I pushed Rewind.

The tape snicked into place and I looked up to find Aurora staring at it as though it were something fanged and poisonous. “Do you want to go into the other room while I play it?” I asked.

She shook her head, her underlip caught between her teeth. Her face was a mask of taut muscle. “Play it,” she said.

I did.

“Welcome to L.A.,” a man's voice boomed. The voice had a hollow echo, like someone shouting in a bathroom. I snatched the machine up and fiddled frantically with the volume control. “Hope you like the hotel,” the man said. “It's supposed to be treschic. I wouldn't know. I haven't got the money to stay there. But you're going to help me with that, aren't you?” His voice reverberated like a loudspeaker in a railroad station.

“Bastard,” Aurora hissed.

“Of course, you're not supposed to be in L.A.,” the man said. “You're supposed to be in Kansas City, waiting for my phone call. You're not taking me seriously. That's a mistake. You want to know how big a mistake it is? Yes, Johnny, as Ed would say, how big a mistake is it? Well, it's this big a mistake.”

There was a rush of something that sounded like water. Aurora was chewing on her sleeve. Aimee's voice split the room.

“Yaahhh,” she cried, “no, no, no, no. Please. Please, please. Anything you want. Please, anything, please God, I'll be good, I'll be, I'll be … Oh, don't. Please don't.” Her voice soared through an octave of agony and into the stratosphere, into the range that only dogs are supposed to hear. Then the splashing sound stopped and there was nothing but sobbing.

I heard a muffled sound like someone picking up a microphone, and the man's voice said, “Once more, darling. With feeling this time,” and we heard the splashing sound, and Aimee gabbled and hollered and gabbled and hollered and wept and snuffled and then gabbled and hollered again.

Aurora had her head down on the arm of the couch. She was making heaving sounds.

“Mommy,” Aimee sobbed, “please come get me, please, please, please. I'll be good, I'll be so good, you and Daddy will. . Oh, no,oh,no, please don't. .” The voice trailed off into a ragged moan that sounded like the world being torn in two.

“I won't, this time,” the man said. “Go home, Mommy. Go home tomorrow morning.”

He said something else, but I didn't hear it. The door to the bedroom had opened and Jane Sorrell stood there, her eyes drugged and fuzzy, her hair hanging in disarranged, half-pinned loops around her neck.

“Aimee?” she said. “Aimee?” Then she looked at Aurora and me and let out a short raspy little breath and fell. She didn't bend her knees or sink gracefully or swoon. She went down like a redwood. Aurora got to her while I was still trying to turn off the tape recorder.

An hour later I pulled across the bridge leading to Wyatt and Annie's house. It was dark. I hammered on the door until Wyatt pulled it open, looking mussed and grumpy.

“Happy Easter,” I said. “Is your daughter still for sale?”