Everything but the Squeal (4 page)

“You're the birthday boy,” I said. “I'll even cheer up, if that's what you want.”

“Don't go overboard,” Wyatt said, clutching his cognac bottle to his chest.

“Would you like to call your children?” Annie asked him.

“They're
my
children, if you noticed,” Wyatt said. “That's a sure sign of how things are around here. If they get straight A's and they haven't killed anything lately, they're Annie's. If their mug shots are pinned to the telephone poles in the canyon, they're mine.” He went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed, “Luke. Jessica. Dinner, believe it or not.”

He turned away from the stairs and threw an arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Simeon. If you get to the table without saying anything else that's depressing, I'll share my cognac with you.”

The table, which Annie waxed obsessively as an outlet for nervous energy, of which she had an abundance, glowed supernaturally. The fireplace crackled. “It's so nice to eat someplace where people don't say grace first,” Miles was saying, ladling onto Joyce's plate something that looked disconcertingly like beef stew. “I never know what to do with my hands, not to mention my soul. And look, the salad has real lettuce in it, not arugula or radicchio or rocket, whatever that is. What in the world is rocket?” he said, looking up as we came in.

“The only lettuce that's not supposed to extinguish sexual desire,” I said. “In the Middle Ages, lettuce was prescribed for nymphomaniacs. Sort of the edible equivalent of a flannel nightgown.”

“I've known people who could eat their way through a flannel nightgown,” Joyce said. “Of course, they're all in jail now.”

“The Doctrine of Signatures,” Miles said, slopping food onto Bernie's plate. “Lettuce is limp, you see. According to the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a very hot theory in the fourteenth century, the way food looked was supposed to be a key to what it was good for. Walnuts looked like little brains, so they were good for brain fever, whatever that actually was. Oysters, because you had to pry them open, were supposed to help women conceive. Asparagus was erect, so it was—”

“We get the point,” Annie said. “Hello, Luke.”

Luke came into the room wearing a Superman T-shirt and red shorts. His knobby little legs ended in a pair of incongruously large furry slippers.

“Everybody looks pretty happy,” Luke said suspiciously. He was a well-known drug nihilist, a preadolescent Carrie Nation who had single-handedly reduced his father's marijuana habit from half an ounce a day, smoked in public, to a furtive joint or two snatched behind the woodpile when the little cop was in school.

“Happy?” Wyatt said as he surreptitiously put the cognac on the floor. “That's the first time this evening that anyone's used that word.”

“Have you been smoking?” Luke said, pulling himself up onto a chair. “Jesus,” he added, looking at the serving dish, “beef stew?”

“It's
ropa
vieja
” Annie said a little defensively.

“That's what I said,” Luke insisted. “Beef stew. The Ochoas serve it all the time.”

“Rachel Ochoa is his current girlfriend,” Annie announced to the table at large.

“Rachel is my
only
girlfriend,” Luke corrected her gravely.

“Yeah?” I said unwisely. “What happened to Ariel?”

“
Ariel
?” Miles said in tempered disbelief. Shakespeare was one of his specialties.

“Ancient history,” Luke said, throwing him a mean little glance. “Just give me some salad.”

“The kid is a born polygamist,” Wyatt said as Miles put a couple of glops of salad onto Luke's plate. “With a career like yours in front of you, you want to be careful with all that lettuce,” he added.

“Why?” Luke said, fork poised.

“Never mind,” Annie said, “and I know you hate it when I say that. Too bad. I'm still bigger than you.”

Wyatt took a slug off the cognac. “Where's your sister?”

Luke made a neat little pile of his salad, putting a piece of avocado on top like a green and suicidal skier poised for a run. His attention was focused entirely on his plate. Then he mashed the whole hill flat with his fork.

Annie had put down her silverware.

“Luke,” she said. “Your father asked you a question. Where's Jessica?”

“She's at Blister's,” Luke said in a small voice.

The silence in the room couldn't have been more profound if the moving finger had suddenly appeared and writ Luke's words large in letters of fire on the wall. Miles was carefully examining his salad. Bernie was leaning far back in his chair and gazing at the ceiling, on the final downhill stretch toward comatose, and Joyce was busy having second thoughts about parenthood.

“Blister,” I said brightly. “What an interesting name.”

“His real name is Lester,” Luke said in an artificially high voice that I recognized as a parody of his sister's. “We call him Blister because he's so
hot
.”

“That's enough,” Annie said. “When did she go?”

“A while ago. She said she'd be back for dinner.” Luke mashed his avocado into a puree fine enough to satisfy Wolfgang Puck.

“Well, she's not,” Wyatt said, gouging long angry scratches into the table's polished surface with the tip of his knife. “And I've had enough.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, then tossed the knife onto his plate, which promptly split in two. Luke looked down at his lap.

“Wyatt, don't,” Annie said, tight-lipped.

“Like hell I won't.” He grabbed a blue parka off a chair and started to put it on.

“Then take Simeon.”

“What am I, the Big Bad Wolf?” Wyatt said. There were small pinched white lines at the wings of his nostrils.

“Please,” Annie said. “Take him.”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” I said, rising. “I've never met anyone named Blister.”

Wyatt glared at me as though he'd never seen me before. It's a very peculiar feeling when your oldest friend suddenly looks dangerous.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “I'm going.”

As I followed him out, I heard Annie say in her Perfect Hostess voice, “Please. Eat your dinner.” Then I heard a chair slam to the floor, and Joyce said, “
Bernie
.”

In the Jeep Wyatt slugged the steering wheel a couple of times before he turned the key. The horn coughed each time. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a
bitch
.
1’
Then the motor caught and we jerked backward over the bridge across the creek. A Chevy van, heading north on Old Canyon Road, hit its brakes and slithered around us, its driver shouting one-syllable words with ancient Old English pedigrees that didn't make them sound any less rude.

“Double damn,” Wyatt said, accelerating and raising the cognac bottle to his lips. I hadn't realized he'd brought it, and the new knowledge wasn't reassuring. “I can handle enemies. What do you do about your own kids?”

“I've never had any.”

“So you're lucky. So shut up.”

I shut up for three or four miles that would have made Wyatt's insurance agent, had he been there, give serious thought to a new career. After we'd passed everything in the vicinity, and after Wyatt had settled the bottle between his thighs, I crossed my fingers and said, “So who's Blister?”

“A dealer,” Wyatt said, jerking the wheel to the right to avoid a plummet down to the creek, which was by then three hundred feet below us.

“Dealing what?”

“Mainly crack. Also regular old coke. Free-enterprise system, you know? Whatever the little kids want to buy.”

“How old?”

“Twenty.”

“
Twenty
?” I asked, shocked in spite of myself. “Jessica's only thirteen.” She was, after all, my goddaughter. “How long has this been going on?”

“A month. Son of a
bitch
,” he said again. This time he pounded the dashboard with a closed fist.

“What happens if you maim him?” I asked.

“My daughter hates me.”

“Not for long.”

Wyatt caught up with something with four wheels, a Starion or a Jetta or a Sentra or something else with a name that was chosen because it sounded good to someone with an accent, and passed it on the right. Gravel rattled beneath the fenderguards, and the horizon took a dizzy spin. The creek, with its ample complement of hard sharp rocks, yawned beneath us, and then we were on the road again.

“Not for long,” I repeated when I could trust my voice.

“What? A week? Two weeks? Do you know how long that is when you're thirteen?”

At least he was conversing in whole sentences. Pushing my luck, I said, “Then let me be the heavy.”

He glanced over at me, and I instantly wished he hadn't.

“
Wyatt
” I mewed. He looked back at the road, crooked the wheel, and somehow managed to navigate between a car that was turning right and another that was coming straight toward us. Various brakes screeched, and he laughed for the first time in five minutes. “Another coat of paint on any of us,” he said, “and we'd be a memory.”

He slowed to maybe seventy. “Anyway,” he said, “we're almost there.”

He wrenched the wheel to the right and we jolted up Entrada, a goat path that can be called a street only by courtesy of L.A. County, which marks it as such on its maps. By anyone else's standards, it is a treacherous, precipitous collection of gaping potholes, so narrow that kids on two-wheelers have frequent head-on collisions. The tops of eucalyptus trees waltzed overhead in the wind, and the stars were as cold and bright as Mrs. Sorrell's sapphire. The scent of sage filled the air. Cold or not, it was too nice a night to die.

Wyatt said, “We’rehere.”

He pulled the car to the left side of the road. Sage scraped at the paint job and the tires squealed. Wyatt looked out his window and swore. Vegetation was pressed against the glass like man-eating plants that smelled blood. “I'll get out on your side,” he said.

He waited, but I didn't reach for the door handle.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm not going to tell you I know how you feel, but listen anyway. We're here to get Jessica. If anyone has to do anything unpleasant, let it be me. It's time to think about short-term goals. All we want is for her to come home with us. If you spread good old Blister's brains all over the wall, she might decide not to. If I do it, on the other hand, she'll just hate me for a while, and I think I can live with that.”

“Open the door,” he growled.

“Eat the big patootie,” I said. “Are you going to behave?”

He lifted his shoulders almost to his ears and blew air out through his mouth. Then he shook his head several times as though he were clearing it, and when he looked at me he was Wyatt again.

“Okay,” he said, “you're the tough guy.”

“Good at heart, though.”

“Whatever you say. Can we go? That bloodsucker could be on top of my daughter right now.”

“If he is,” I said, “you get her out from under, and I'll put him on top of something else. Like a broken aquarium, okay?”

He nodded, and I opened the door.

I was out and he was past me so fast that I barely saw him. He sprinted up a series of stone steps that put a permanent part in the sagebrush, and I followed as best I could. By the time I got to the top of the steps I was winded, and Wyatt was pounding at the door of a surprisingly nice house that commanded a panoramic view of hills and sky.

I grabbed his hand in mid-pound, and it was a good thing I did, because it opened at precisely that moment and Wyatt would have begun the negotiations by hitting his daughter in the face. He tried to jerk his hand away from me, then focused and let it drop to his side.

“Daddy,” Jessica said coolly. “Is dinner ready?”

I hadn't seen her in a few months, and I wasn't prepared. Sure, she was still a baby to anyone who'd known her as long as I had, but she was a woman too. Most of the baby fat that makes children look so tentative had dropped away, revealing a face that had made up its mind to be beautiful. She wore a raggedly slashed T-shirt, shrunk bleached jeans, and a cloud of light brown hair with golden highlights. She sighted behind her father to look at me, and her hazel eyes narrowed slightly.

“Yes, it is,” Wyatt said tightly. “In fact, it's getting cold.”

“Mommy's
ropa
vieja
never gets cold,” she said. “Even when it's a week old, it'll blow your pants off.”

“And I'm glad to see that yours are on,” he said.

“Oh, please,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say.

Wyatt grabbed her arm and gave her a shake that almost lifted her off her feet. “We're going,” he said.

“So go,” said a male voice from behind her, and a lanky young man pulled the door the rest of the way open. “Take her with you. She was going home anyway.”

“I don't need your fucking permission to take my daughter home,” Wyatt said.

Blister passed a hand through limp hair that dangled over a narrow forehead. He was wearing white drawstring pants and slippers, and his stomach muscles looked like something you wouldn't want to hit your head on. His eyebrows collided above his nose. The air from the room inside was overripe with cigarette smoke.

“This is boring,” Blister said. “Oh, and happy birthday, Dad.”

My hand was on Wyatt's shoulder, and I felt him tense to lunge at Blister, but Jessica defused the moment. Without turning around, she said, “Don't call him Dad.” It was not a tone that invited discussion.

“So what am I supposed to call him?” Blister asked indolently.

“Call me Wyatt,” Wyatt said after a massive effort.

“Yo, Blister,” I said softly. Blister's eyes went to me for the first time. “Hi,” I said. I made a small confidential pointing gesture at Wyatt. “Call him Mr. Wilmington.”

“Who's this?” Blister asked the world in general.

“Nobody much,” I said, smiling. “You can call me The Man with No Name.”

Jessica looked from Wyatt to me and misjudged the degree to which the conversation had become civilized. “How about you give me half an hour, Daddy?” she asked. “Blister will drive me home.”