Everything but the Squeal

9

Jessica was sullen. “You screwed up a perfectly good party, you know?” She assumed the offensive the moment I pulled Alice out onto Old Topanga Canyon. “Acting like an old fart. You and my father. And poor Blister, he's been walking like a cowboy ever since.”

“He's lucky to be walking. If I had my way he'd be crawling on his belly like a reptile. That's from ‘Little Egypt,’ written by Lieber and Stoller, recorded by the Coasters. You wouldn't remember it.”

“I certainly wouldn't,” she said. “And if you weren't so goddamned old, you wouldn't either. What's it to you, anyway, what I do with Blister? When did you join the church?”

“He’s too old for you.”

“You and my father,” she said again. “You know, I was raised like, um, my parents always went, sex is a normal, natural thing. People who didn't understand that were sick. Just a normal part of your life, right? So how come all of a sudden everybody's got their bowels in an uproar because I'm maybe going to bed with Blister? Why does everybody go so corny all of a sudden? You know why it is? It's because they're liberals. All liberals do is talk.”

“And what are you?”

“Oh, leave me alone.”

“He's too old for you. And he's a louse.”

“And he's taking advantage of me?” she said, drawing out the middle “Aaaa” in “advantage” as though it were a word in itself. I was watching the road, but I knew her upper lip was curled. “What do you want, that I should do it with some little shrub who can't tell a condom from a condominium?”

“I don't want anything,” I said. “I just don't like Blister.”

“I don't like him all that much myself,” she said unexpectedly. “But the pickings in Topanga aren't exactly world-class.” Not knowing what to say, I shut up.

It was drizzling as we went down the hill toward the ocean. Alice was built in the fifties, the age of convenience, and both the passenger and the driver were thoughtfully equipped with shiny chrome buttons that operate all the windows in the car. After a snicker to let me know how corny I was, Jessica reached up and opened the windows on my side.

I endured the cold and the sting of the drizzle against my face until we made the turn. Then I used my own buttons to raise both windows on the driver's side and open the ones on hers. Jessica promptly slid mine down again. I waited eight or ten minutes, until the Pacific, slate-gray and flatter than a razor's edge, slipped into sight between the hills and then raised the windows on my side, leaving hers open.

Jessica made a show of fanning her face with one hand, then closed her windows and opened mine. I closed all of them and pushed the button that locked all of them, the only button she didn't have. As I turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway she fiddled unsuccessfully with the buttons and gave me a glance that must have cost her several grams of self-control. Then she turned her angelic face sweetly up to me, shifted delicately onto one haunch, and emitted a ladylike fart.

“Where’d all the fun go?” I said to no one in particular.

She gave me both barrels, a full-bore, hazel-eyed gaze. “Mommy says you're having an elastic adolescence,” she said at last. “You've stretched it and stretched it, but one day it's going to snap back and leave you nowhere.”

It sounded like something Annie might say. “I prefer to think of it as an escalator,” I said, not very convincingly. “I'm enjoying the ride. When it's taken me high enough, I'll get off.”

“And who will you be then?”

“Me. But older.”

“Older?” she said nastily. “You must be joking.” It was her second shot at the same target, and I figured she might be running out of bullets.

“People do get older,” I said. “They even get older than I am. Someday you'll be older than I am now. Maybe you'll look back at this moment and say, ‘Why wasn't I nicer to that poor kid?’ ”

“Fat chance.” She took a satisfied sniff at the rotten-egg air and settled back, gazing through the windshield and daring me to do anything about it.

“Listen,” I said, largely to prevent myself from giving in and opening the window, “the best thing that can happen to you is to get older. As someone once said, consider the alternative.”

“Huh?”

I negotiated a curve in silence, waiting for her to get it. The Pacific slapped in disinterestedly to our right. When she didn't get it, I said, “Being dead.”

“Oh,” she said dismissively. “That.”

“The dead can't fart,” I said, losing points.

“They don't have to. They already smell bad.”

We let a mile or so pass in malodorous silence. When I felt reasonably safe from scorn, I lowered my window.

“Chicken,” she said, sounding pleased for the first time. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and checked it for split ends. “I knew you were chicken. Blister should have farted at you. You would have fallen down the stairs headfirst.” She gave up on her hair.

“What are you doing with a coke dealer?”

She emitted an exasperated little poof of air. “He's not just a dealer. He's a person too. Anyway, don't go figuring I hang around with him just so he can keep me high.”

“Then what is it? His stomach muscles?”

“Oh, give me credit. I tried it. Why wouldn't I? But then I quit. Who wants to feel fast and stupid at the same time? It's like the Super Bowl, you know? There's always two guys talking: the big slow dumb guy and the little fast dumb guy. Who wants to be the little fast dumb guy?”

“Jessica,” I said, turning to her. “How did you get this way? I knew you when you were one year old.”

“You have the advantage of me,” she said loftily. “And how about you keep your eyes on the road?”

I eyed the road, reflecting on the exchange between Wyatt, Annie, and me on the previous evening, when I'd asked them if I could have Jessica. First I'd reexplained the case I was working on.

“Are you kidding?” Annie had said. “She could get killed.”

“She could get scared,” I'd said. “Right now, she feels like she'll live forever, no matter what she does. Screw around with Blister? No problem. Run away? So what? All she has to do is come home and flash that old Jessica smile and you'll both be falling all over each other to make her bed and buy her school clothes.”

“So what are you saying?” Wyatt had asked. He wasn't crazy about the fact that I'd been up at Blister's with him that night; he was, after all, Wyatt Wilmington the Third, even if he had decided to be a carpenter rather than a real-estate mogul like his father, and his family had always kept its problems to itself. It was the sacred WASP tradition: what matters is what people can see. Keep it secret, and maybe it can be fixed before it makes the papers.

“Wyatt,” I said. He was my oldest friend, and Annie had been my girlfriend when I introduced her to Wyatt all those years ago when we were innocent students at UCLA. “Wyatt, I'm in the family. She's my goddaughter. I drove Annie to the hospital when she was going to be born, with the two of you in the back seat. You remember how smoothly I took the curves?”

Wyatt gave a grudging nod. He'd been too nervous to drive.

“Well, I'm going to do the same now. She's going to see that kids can't always go home again. She's going to realize for the first time that there are lines that we cross, or don't cross, that can't always be crossed in the other direction. She's going to see kids who can't hope to live more than another couple of years.”

“And you're going to protect her?” That was Annie.

“You're protecting her now?” I said, without really thinking.

There was a long silence, and the two of them exchanged a glance from which I was profoundly excluded. I looked down at my coffee cup. It had coffee in it.

“Why do you want her?” Annie finally said. “What's she supposed to be?”

“She's my I.D. card,” I said. “She'll make me fit in.” Annie shuffled off one of her slippers and looked down at it as though it contained an answer. “Just my I.D. card,” I repeated.

In the car, my I.D. card said, “I'm hungry. This is sure a weird way to spend Easter. Normally I'd be stealing pieces off the ham by now.” It was two o'clock.

“Well, luckily for you, we're going to a restaurant.”

“Will they have ham?”

“If they do, you probably won't recognize it.”

“What restaurant?”

“It's called Tommy's Oki-Burger.”

“Blister's been there,” she said. “He told me something about it.”

“It's Blister's kind of place. What'd he tell you?”

“That it was full of kids who'd split from home. And don't knock Blister. It's boring.”

“Did he tell you what they were doing there?”

“Peddling their butts, he said.”

“That's about it.”

She thought about it for a while. “Why are we going?”

“You're going to help me find a little girl.”

“Is she peddling her butt?”

“Where do you hear expressions like that?”

“Around,” she said, sounding like a teenager for the first time. “Is she?”

“I don't know. For all I know, she's dead.”

“Zowie,” she said, half under her breath. “Is it going to be dangerous?”

“I don't think so. Not for you, at any rate.”

“Hell,” she said, clearly disappointed. After a moment she said, “Well, anyway, it sounds like fun.”

“It does, huh?”

“More fun than Blister,” she said.

Jessica started eating the moment we got to Tommy's. The place was largely empty at first; then, as the afternoon wore on into evening, it began to fill up with the usual highly checkered crowd. The Mountain had spent most of Easter Sunday out on the blacktop parking lot, practicing Sumo wrestling with some other fat guys inside a small circle painted on the asphalt. Jessica had stopped, fascinated, as the fat guys grunted and puffed inside the circle. Finally the Mountain had forced his opponent-a Japanese who couldn't have weighed less than three hundred pounds-outside the circle. He wiped his face with the malodorous cheesecloth and scanned the small crowd that had gathered to watch. He nodded pleasantly down at me, and then his eyes traveled down to Jessica. Cowed a bit by the sheer pleasure of all that sweating male flesh, she had slipped her hand into mine.

The Mountain's face dropped. When he looked back up at me, all semblance of good feeling was gone. He looked like an ill-considered cross between Charles Manson and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Elaborately, he spat at my feet and then he turned his back on us and stepped back into the ring.

“Friend of yours?” Jessica said.

“Not anymore, it seems.” I was debating whether to tap the Mountain on the shoulder and try to explain, when he picked up a man who outweighed the average tractor-trailer semi and threw him out of the ring as though he'd been a Q-Tip. That ended the debate. Jessica and I went back inside and she started to eat.

She'd gotten up to go to the bathroom when two regulars, a couple of pre-op transsexuals, greeted each other with the highest squeals I'd heard since the Beatles played the Bowl, and sat down at the table next to me.

“Dear,” said the blond one, who was attired, despite the chill in the air, in a pair of gym shorts and a K-Mart blouse. “Dear, do you have any pants? Someone stole everything last night: my clothes, my cash, my makeup-even the good stuff, the Avon and the Clinique? Do you know what a girl has to go through to get Clinique? It's more expensive than safiron.” She lit a cigarette, ignoring the one that she'd just laid down in the ashtray.

“And almost as yellow,” her friend said, snatching up the first cigarette with the air of someone stumbling over a canteen in Death Valley.

“Yellow, yellow, marshmallow. I wouldn't mind looking like the Dragon Lady, as long as I could look like something” the blond one said, exhaling a vehement cloud of smoke. “Look at me now, I'm so sallow. I've got circles under my eyes like the rings on a coaster, and I've got more pits than the full moon. Honey, they took everything.”

“Your aura is intact,” the other one said, scanning the street with practiced eyes.

“Beg pardon?”

“In fact, it could use a perm.” A nice-looking teenager in the street let his gaze slide off the brunette's face and went back to checking out the traffic.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

Rejected by the teenager, the other one, the brunette one with nine earrings, squinted at the blond and said, “A little psychometric Kirlian photography tells me that your roots to the nether world are in place. I can see them shimmering.”

“Well, what the hell good is that? Just look at me. Nothing on but these stupid gym shorts, loaned to me by a very active friend, and this awful blouse. Mamie Eisenhower wouldn't have worn this blouse. Honey, it's April. I'm freezing to death. I must say, I'd hoped for a bit more sympathy.”

“I've got my own problems,” the brunette said. He, or maybe she, pulled his or her tank top down to reveal two swollen nipples. “Six weeks,” he or she said, “six fucking weeks of both shots and pills, and what have I got to show for it? Mosquito bites. At this rate, I'll be almost as old as you are before I can wear a B-cup.”

“B-cup indeed,” the blond one said. “Dream on. You're talking shot glasses.”

“God, I hate Leos,” said the one with the nine earrings. She turned suddenly to me. “What sign are you?”

“I'm a Chameleon,” I said.

“In other words,” the one with the earrings said, pouting, “fuck off.”

“Not necessarily,” the blond said. “I like people who don't believe in astrology.”

“Then I'm your man,” I said, sipping at my diet asphalt.

“Wouldn't that be nice?” the blond said, leaning toward me.

“What the hell do rabbits have to do with Easter?” Jessica said loudly, sitting down and fingering the cardboard bunny stapled to the pole at the head of our table. There were similar bunnies all over the place. Someone had drawn exaggerated genitalia on the one at our table.

“Oh, my God,” the blond said, recoiling. “You're a pervert My God, she's barely pubescent.” Well, at least nobody thought I was a cop anymore.

“Are you talking about me?” Jessica demanded, sounding like the Grand Duchess of Fredonia. “Because if you are, I don't like your tone.”

“Leave her to her sugar daddy,” the one with the nine earrings said. The two of them shifted their weight and faced away from us, their surgically improved noses in the air.

“I know a guy in school who's going to end up like those two,” Jessica said in a voice that would have penetrated a foot of lead. “Maybe I should bring him down here and give him a preview of coming attractions. It might straighten him up.”

The blond started to turn back to us, and I could feel Jessica brace herself for the collision to come.

“The Easter Bunny,” I said, plucking at the air. “That's a very interesting question. On the face of it, rabbits don't seem to have much to do with the Resurrection of Christ.”

“No shit,” Jessica said, watching the blond the way a mongoose watches a cobra.

“The, ah, the early Church took a very practical approach to the problem of getting started in places where other religions were already established. They built their churches right on top of the other religions' temples, and they did the same with their holidays.”

“Yeah?” Jessica said, narrowing her eyes to meet the blond's gaze and picking up a fork from the tray in front of her. She tested it for balance, looking like Jim Bowie's granddaughter. The blond, relegated to the role of the cobra, hissed.

“They scheduled Christmas for the midwinter solstice, the most important festival of the year in the colder countries, when everybody feasted to celebrate having made it through the first half of the winter and started to look forward to surviving the second half.” I leaned forward and removed the fork from her hand. “Easter was slotted at the time of the spring fertility rites, held to ensure good crops and big herds of cattle or sheep or whatever the hell they were herding. Rabbits are symbols of fertility, for what I hope are obvious reasons, because if they're not, I'm not going to explain them.”

“Because they screw like minks,” Jessica said in her piping treble. The blond, who probably hadn't been shocked since Halley's Comet, looked shocked. “And who's the genius who figured out that they lay eggs?” There was an Easter basket, lined with that terrible green cellophane grass, on the table-there was one on every table-and Jessica picked up the top egg in the basket and hefted it, evaluating its potential as a weapon. It had DOTTIE written on it in sparkles.

“Eggs are a fertility symbol too,” I said, hoping she didn't plan to toss it at the blond.

“Well, duh,” Jessica said scornfully. “They're also nice and heavy.”

“But they've been layered over with Christian symbolism. They represent, among other things, the closed tomb from which Christ rose.”

“Huh,” Jessica said, looking down at the one in her hand.

“Um, listen,” the blond said, “is all that true?”

“Sure,” I said. “It's not what they teach you in Sunday school, but it's as true as anything else.”

The blond looked from Jessica to me and then took a speculative leap. “You're her uncle.”

“Sure, Tammy,” the Mountain said, looming vast and horrible behind her. “Sure he is. And I'm her little sister.” His greasy hair was captured behind his head with a bright pink rubber band, and his face was oiled with sweat. He gave me a look that made my sneakers itch.

It was a delicate situation: having dispelled the cop image, I wasn't inclined to explain the relationship between Jessica and me. I tugged the extremely heavy corners of my mouth up into a rictus that I was sure looked less like Easter than Halloween.

“Heh, heh,” I said, appreciating his good-natured joke.

“He was telling us about Easter,” the blond-Tammy-said.

“Was he?” the Mountain said ponderously. He wiped his hands on the cheesecloth as a prelude to spreading me over the table like margarine. “I didn't figure it,” he said, reaching for my neck. “I didn't know what you were, but I didn't think you were a dink.”

“Oh, boy,” the blond said, happily changing sides. “Eighty-six.”

I'd chosen the little finger of his left hand as the easiest one to break and was reaching up for it when Tommy, behind the counter, yelled: “Mountain!”

The Mountain, not one who was used to doing two things at once, stumbled and looked up. “Nuh,” he said. He swatted my hands from his pinky as though they'd been a couple of enervated houseflies and stared toward the counter. “What, huh?” he said to Tommy. “What?”

“Pakking lot,” Tommy said in his best Okinawan English. He was the one who'd taught the Mountain sumo. “Fight. Inna pakking lot. Get ‘em. Oddawise, cops.”

“Balls,” the Mountain said. He looked back down at me. I was shaking my hands in the air to relieve the sting. They felt like a locomotive had hit them. “You sit tight,” he said, patting me on the cheek. The pat nearly dislocated my jaw. “I'll get to you.” He lumbered off toward the fight inna pakking lot.

“He really likes you,” Jessica said. “You know what? I think he thinks you're a dirty old man.”

“Isn't he?” the blond asked with genuine interest.

For the next couple of hours the Mountain was too busy to bother with me. The place got full and then it got fuller. Kids who had been hustling in the drizzle came by to dry out and fill up, and the Mountain, after a long hiatus, returned from the general vicinity of the kitchen. Around his equator he wore something I hadn't seen before: a canvas change apron, like the ones worn by the ladies who work the slots in Las Vegas. On it were stenciled the words Call Home.

As each kid came in, the Mountain reached into one of the pockets of his apron and pulled out a slip of paper with a number on it. Some kids didn't want to take them, but the Mountain exercised his unique powers of persuasion, and almost all of the kids wound up tucking a number into a pocket. Then they went and checked the Easter baskets, usually pulling out an egg after painstakingly reading the names on all of them. The ones who didn't take one of the Mountain's slips of paper were eighty-sixed. I wouldn't say they were thrown out gently, but by the Mountain's standards it was an exercise in restraint.

“What in the world is going on?” Jessica said. By now Tammy and her friend, who called herself Velveeta, were sitting with us, sipping discreetly at beer from Diet Pepsi cups. They'd bought the beer at Glamour Liquors across the street, and I was sucking up the Glamour with them. Jessica hadn't asked for one, but every time I turned to watch the Mountain in action I found that the level in my cup had dropped an inch or two. She and Tammy were having a pretty good time.

“E.T. time,” Tammy said. “Call home, get it? He does this every holiday. Sometimes he does it every Tuesday.”

“Seven,” the Mountain bellowed, and a frail, anorexic-looking blond girl with very sharp knees got up from her table, none too steadily, and advanced toward the pay phone. The Mountain ladled some change out of his apron and handed it to her more gently than I would have thought possible. I watched her whisper into the Mountain's ear, and then he took some of the change out of her hand, dialed the phone, and handed her the receiver. She hastily pocketed the rest of the change, and he let her. After a moment the girl said, “Hello? Mom?”

When I turned back, my beer cup was empty and Tammy and Jessica were giggling. Velveeta took the cup and filled it from a bottle held discreetly beneath the table. “Fountain of Truth,” she said optimistically, batting her eyelashes at me.

While the girl was on the phone the Guitar Player came in, wet with rain, the imitation Stratocaster hanging from its frayed strap. His dark hair was dripping down into his eyes. He threw an anxious glance at the Mountain, who nodded him in as though nothing had ever happened, and then he was followed by a little girl, even younger than Jessica, who looked like she hadn't eaten in days. She stood in the doorway, surveying the scene with big starved eyes.

With new confidence, the Guitar Player took the Mountain by one arm and whispered something in his ear. The Mountain went back into the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared with an Easter egg in his hand. I couldn't read the name. The little girl looked at it in disbelief for a moment, her eyes going back and forth from the Guitar Player to the Mountain. Then she reached up and used the sleeve of her enormous sweater to wipe something away from her cheek. The Mountain pointed the Guitar Player to a table and gave him a slip of paper. The Guitar Player sat down and rummaged in the Easter basket that occupied its center. He fished out an egg labeled DONNIE. It sparkled at me across the room. The little girl sat down next to him and started to put the egg in her purse, being very careful not to knock off the sparkles.

“Eat it, stupid,” the Guitar Player said. The anorexic girl hung up the phone and wobbled back to her table.

“Have you called home?” said the Mountain to the little girl who had come in with the Guitar Player.

The phone rang. The Mountain went to it and listened, waving an arm to quiet people down. The little girl started to peel her egg. A couple of new arrivals rifled through the basket on our table and pulled out eggs with their names on them. The Mountain said something into the phone and turned to survey the tables. “Donnie,” he bellowed.

“Shit,” the Guitar Player said. “Tell her I'm not here.” The Mountain screwed up his little pink eyes and gave him a look that should have left an exit wound. Donnie unslung his guitar and went to the phone. All over the restaurant, people stopped talking and looked at him. A dull blush rose to his cheeks.

“Yeah,” he said. “Hi, Mom. Listen, I'm kind of busy. Give me your number and I'll call you back.” He started to hang up, but the Mountain clapped his hands over Donnie's ears, trapping the phone in place. Donnie struggled for a second, and the Mountain placed a size-twelve triple-E foot over both of Donnie's sneakers. The girl chewed on her egg with the dreamy concentration of the truly hungry.

“You know,” Donnie said into the phone, “just working with the band.” Somebody laughed, and the Mountain fixed her with a stare that transformed the laughter into a coughing fit. It was the Old Young Woman. She turned all her attention to peeling an egg for the Toothless Man. His egg said HERBIE. He put half of it in the back of his mouth and went to work. Egg white gathered at the corners of his mouth.

“Gross,” Jessica said under her breath.

“Yeah, well, don't forget to floss,” I said to her.

She gave me Parent Stare Number Twelve. “Give me a break,” she said.

“No problem,” Donnie said to the phone, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Really, doing great. Cold back there?” He nodded, glaring at everyone within earshot. “Sunny out here,” he said, just as a bucket of rain hit the roof.

“And the band just got a gold record,” the Old Young Woman said to the Toothless Man.

Donnie got through the call somehow and sat back down next to the little girl. He searched his pockets and came up with some coins, then went to the counter to order. The Mountain barked another number, and a thin guy with a lot of volcanic activity on his face went to the phone. The Mountain dropped change into his hands. Donnie came back with a burger and cut it into exact halves. He gave half to the little girl, who looked at it as though it were a whole Easter ham.

Jessica, who hadn't stopped chewing and drinking since we arrived, picked up the egg she had dropped back into the basket on our table. “Hey,” she called to the Mountain, “can I eat this?” I tried to kick her under the table, but missed.

The Mountain hovered over me. Malevolence rose from him in fumes like heat off a road, but it was aimed at me, not her.

“Is your name Dottie?” he asked. Sure enough, that's what the egg said: dottie.

“It's my middle name,” Jessica said without turning a hair. “Jessica Dottie Wilmington.” Her middle name was, and always had been, Jill.

The Mountain gave me another death stare, just to keep in shape, and then smiled at her. “Go to it, then,” he said. “I guess she's not coming anyway.”

Jessica picked it up. She started to crack the shell, and I looked at the name again and then took it from her hand.

“Hey,” she said. “That's mine.”

Her tone made the Mountain, who'd been lumbering back toward the pay phone, turn and stare. He'd had more than enough of me. “I gave it to her, shitbag,” he said, advancing. “You can take her money if that's your angle, but goddammit, that's her egg.”

“Dottie,” I said, talking fast. He was on top of me. “As in Dorothy? Is she blond? About thirteen, looks a little younger?”

“What's it to you? You already got one, don't you? What are you, trying to build up a string?” He leaned over me and I smelled the cheesy odor of the mummy's wrap he used to swab the tables.

“Dottie-I mean, Dorothy-Gale?” I said. “From Kansas?”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “I think maybe you ought to get out of here. Maybe you should stay out of here. Otherwise, something might happen to your face, and then how would you scam the little chicklets?”

“We have to talk,” I said.

“Eighty-six,” he said, “and I'm going to love it.” He grabbed the shoulder of my shirt and hauled me up.

“Jessica,” I said, “tell him who I am.”

She looked up at me through long blond lashes. “I don't really know who you are,” she said. “You told me your name was George.”

Tammy laughed. “They're all named George,” she said, sipping at her cup.

“You asshole,” the Mountain said. “I hope you can fly.” He picked me up as though I were made of balsawood and toted me toward the sidewalk. Various mouths opened in expectation.

“Wait,” Jessica said. “He's my-”

“Tell him in private,” I said, trying to make hushing motions with my hands. The Mountain's arms were tight across my chest and I was beginning to see an interesting pattern of little black dots.

“Tell me what?” the Mountain said. He didn't ease the pressure of his arms. I tried to say something, and produced a postliterate wheeze.

“My godfather,” Jessica said. “He's a detective.”

A hush, the kind they call Angel's Flight, seized the restaurant. Tammy looked up at me, betrayal in her eyes. Donnie took the little girl by the hand as though to protect her.

I tried again. “Can we talk?” It sounded more like the jet stream than it did like English, but the Mountain relaxed enough to let me grab a few cubic centimeters of air. He looked at Jessica, who was nodding faster than a presidential yes-man, and then at me.

“I guess so,” he said. Then, from a height of about two feet, he dropped me.