Everything but the Squeal (9 page)

8 - The Dog's Stratosphere

E 
aster 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
très
chic
. 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?”

II

The Little Chickie Begged

9 - Easter

J 
essica 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.