T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But Officer Kraybill wasn’t interested in Phil’s problems. He stepped over him and strode into the garage, where all the caged squirrels set up an expectant chittering. Molly went up and down the mesh of her cage like a monkey—she thought it was treat time—and Rudolfo sat up and clicked his teeth like a pair of castanets. In the time it took Grace to scoop Phil from the floor and step into the garage, a squirrel under each arm, Officer Kraybill had made up his mind. “You are in illegal possession of wildlife,” he announced, turning to her, “and unless these creatures are released back into the wild, we will have to confiscate them.”

  Grace was stunned. “Confiscate? But they need me, can’t you see that? They’d die if I set them loose.”

  “These squirrels—and all wildlife—are the property of the State of California, and it is against the law to keep, traffic in or domesticate them.”

  Grace felt her heart stop, just like that, as if she was stretched out on the operating table, as if her pacemaker had gone dead in her chest. And then she caught her breath and her heart started up again and she was fierce with the sudden hammering of it. They weren’t going to take her babies away, no one was. Never. She came right back at him and she felt no obligation to be polite now that he’d shown his colors. “But I can kill them, though, can’t I? I can stalk them with a gun, innocent things that wouldn’t hurt a fly, isn’t that right?”

  The eyes were back in their orbits. The beard stabbed at her. “If you have a valid hunting license, in season; there’s no bag limit on ground squirrels.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  He shrugged.

  “But they’re people,” Grace said, and she could hear the break in her own voice, “little fur people.”

  When the phone rang, Jet was coloring her hair. She was only twenty-eight, but she’d had gray in her hair since she was in her teens, and now she had to touch up her roots every other week if she didn’t want to look like the Bride of Frankenstein. It didn’t really bother her—haircolor was one of the grim necessities of life, like lipstick, eyeliner and makeup—but lately she’d begun to notice some gray down below—or white, actually, coiled white hairs of amazing length—and that really upset her. She’d spent nearly an hour the other night with the tweezers and a mirror, her legs propped up against the bathtub, the whole thing feeling vaguely obscene and not a little ridiculous, but she kept wondering what Vincent would think if he saw her turning white before his eyes. They’d only been dating a month, but he was two years younger than her and she’d told him she was twenty-five. Gray hairs. Little folds under her eyes. Some sort of scale on the back of her hands. And now she had the black paste all over her scalp, wondering if she should try it down there too—not this time, but maybe next—and the phone started ringing. She wriggled out of the plastic gloves and held the receiver gingerly to her wet ear.

  Her mother’s voice was there suddenly, gasping out her name over the wire, and it was the gasp of a drowning woman, a woman asphyxiating on her own sobs. “My babies! They want to take my babies!”

  When Jet got to the house, her hair still damp and black now with the sheer glistening chemical glow of the dye that would take two or three good shampooings to mellow into something that could pass for natural, she found the front door locked. “Ma,” she called, “you in there?” and she was about to go round back when a movement across the street caught her attention. It was her mother, dressed in an oversize green sweater that hid the flare of her hips, and she was rattling the wrought-iron gate out front of Mrs. Tranh’s house. This struck Jet as odd on a number of counts, not the least of which was that her mother and Mrs. Tranh had never been particularly friendly—or even neighborly, for that matter. But then nothing her mother did lately would have surprised Jet. People called Grace eccentric, but to Jet’s mind the term didn’t begin to describe the gulf of abstraction her mother seemed to be floundering in. That was what it meant to get old and have your husband die and your heart go bad. Eccentricity. It was like gray hairs.

  Jet crossed the street, watching her mother’s shoulders as Grace fumbled with the latch, bewildered by the simple mechanism. Maybe it was one of the squirrels, Jet was thinking, maybe that was it. One of them escaped or something and she was canvassing the neighborhood. From the sound of her voice on the phone you would have thought they’d dropped a bomb on the house or something.

  “Gladys!” Grace cried out suddenly in a high, oddly fluty voice, as if she were locked in an echo chamber. “Gladys Tranh! You open this gate!” A car that was badly in need of a muffler sputtered up the street. The starlings nesting in the twin palms out front of the Tranh house began to squabble and a few shot out from beneath the protection of the fronds as if they’d been expelled. “Gladys! I want to talk to you!”

  Mrs. Tranh had cautiously cracked open her front door and extruded the nearly bald bulb of her head by the time Jet had reached her mother. Mrs. Tranh had a tight smile frozen on her face. She was so old she’d begun to look like a Chihuahua, and when was the last time Jet had seen her? “Go ‘way,” she said.

  “Ma?” Jet reached out to touch her mother’s arm. “Ma, what’s wrong—is it the squirrels?”

  Her mother turned to fix her with a tragic look and Jet felt something tighten inside her. “Jet,” was all her mother could say, and she forced out the single syllable of her only daughter’s name as if with her expiring breath. There were tears in her eyes. Her hands shook as they tried to make sense of the latch. But then she swung back round on Mrs. Tranh, who was gazing defiantly at her from across the expanse of the front walk, and lifted her voice: “You made that complaint, didn’t you? I know it was you. You just can’t stand to see anybody doing any good in this world, can you?”

  “Ma,” Jet said, taking hold of her mother’s arm, but Grace shook her off.

  “They want to take my babies!” she cried suddenly, and half a dozen starlings flew shrieking from the palms.

  Mrs. Tranh’s eyes glittered, two fragments of volcanic glass buried in the worn hide of her face. “They stink, your baby,” Mrs. Tranh said in a gritty, dried-out voice. “Dirty animal.”

  Jet had begun to feel conspicuous. At least two cars had passed and slowed as if this were some sort of spectacle, a sideshow, and a woman three doors down—was that Mrs. Mahon?—had stepped out onto her porch. Jet’s scalp tingled under the lingering assault of the chemical, and she looked away for a moment, distracted. That was when her mother threw one sneaker-clad foot atop the spikes of the wrought-iron fence and attempted to boost herself over, muttering under her breath. “Ma,” Jet snapped, and she couldn’t help herself, everyone was looking, “have you gone crazy or what? Come down off there, come on,” and she was tugging at her mother’s sweater and fighting the rigid pole of her mother’s leg when Violet Tranh appeared in the doorway behind her own mother. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. And then: “Jet? Mrs. Gargano?”

  At this point, Jet had succeeded in extricating her mother’s foot from the spikes of the railing, but perversely Grace had seized two of the palings and refused to let go. “Damn it, Ma, what’s wrong?” Jet hissed as Violet Tranh came down the walk and stationed herself on the far side of the gate, an expression that might be interpreted as satiric pressed into the smooth flesh at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Violet was the youngest of the Tranhs and she and Jet had gone to high school together. Jet was thinking about that as the faces seemed to multiply up and down the block and the cars slowed and Violet smirked. They’d both had a crush on the same guy once—Derek Kubota—and Violet was the one he’d finally asked out.

  “What’s the problem?” Violet said.

  “It’s nothing,” Jet assured her. “My mom’s just a little upset, is all.” Jet wanted to sink right on down through the sidewalk and become one with the grubs, beetles and worms.

  “I’m not upset,” Grace insisted, turning a furious face on her. “It’s your mother,” she said, coming back to Violet. “She”—and here her voice bro
ke again—“she put in a complaint about my, my babies.”

  Mrs. Tranh spoke up then, her voice leaping and pitching through a morass of Vietnamese that sounded like the recipe for a six-course meal. Violet looked straight into Jet’s eyes as she translated. “My mother says this is a residential neighborhood, zoned for houses, not animals.”

  “Animals?” Jet echoed, and though she knew the whole thing was ridiculous, she could feel the anger rising in her. “We’re talking squirrels here, aren’t we? Are we on the same page or what? Look up in the trees, why don’t you?—the squirrels were here before we were.”

  Violet never took her eyes off her. It was like a staring contest, a stripping away of the flesh to probe at the vitals beneath. “Yeah,” she said, and her voice had a real edge to it, “and so were the dinosaurs.”

  Grace knew what was coming. She knew the Officer Kraybills of the world didn’t care a fig about mercy or tenderness or what was right and good—no, all they cared about was the law, the stupid law that allowed you to blast your fellow creatures out of the trees but made you into a criminal if you dared to try and ease their suffering. And they would be back, she was sure of that.

  All that week she was up before dawn, up and dressed, brooding over her coffee while her babies played at her feet. She’d released Florio (as if that would satisfy them) because he didn’t need her care anymore—Dr. Diaz had removed the splint and pronounced him fit. The only thing was, Florio refused to go. Every time she looked up, there he was, staring in at the window, and it didn’t matter what part of the house she went to—living room, basement, kitchen, bedroom—there he was, cluttering at the glass. Finally, last night, when the temperature dipped down into the thirties, she’d broken down and let him back in. He was under the table now, wrestling with Rudolfo. They’d become best friends, nothing short of that, and how could she justify separating them?

  Still, she was no fool, and she knew they’d be back—Officer Kraybill and probably some other officious puff-bearded servant of the law—to badger and bully her into giving up her babies. They’d have a subpoena or search warrant or something and they’d tramp through her house like the Gestapo, hauling away her sick ones even as she barred the door with her body. The image appealed to her—barring the door with her body—and she was holding it there in the steam that rose from her second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang and all her worst fears were realized.

  It was Officer Kraybill—she recognized him through the receding lens of the peephole in the front door—and he had two others with him, a man and a woman dressed in uniforms identical to his. Three of them, and she couldn’t help thinking that was the way it always was in the movies and on TV when they had to evict widows or tear children from their mothers’ breasts, safety in numbers, don’t get your hands dirty. But oh, boy, her heart was going. She crouched there behind the door and she didn’t know what to do. The bell rang again and then again. She heard them conferring in a blur of voices and then a shadow flitted past the curtains in the living room and she heard the doorknob rattle in the kitchen. She was one step ahead of them: it was locked, locked and bolted.

  “Mrs. Gargano? Are you in there?”

  It was his voice, Officer Kraybill’s, and she could picture his fish eyes going crazy in his head. She held her breath, crouched lower. And that might have been the end of it, at least for then, but just at that moment Misty came shooting across the rug with Florio on her heels and the two of them made a leap for the clothestree and the clothestree slammed into the wall with a thump you could have heard all the way to Sherman Oaks and back.

  “Mrs. Gargano? I can hear you in there. Now will you open up or do I have to use force? It’s in our power, you know—you are harboring wild animals in there and as agents of the Fish and Game Department we have the right of search and seizure. Do you hear me? Mrs. Gargano?”

  She had to speak up then, because she was afraid and because the germ of an idea had begun to take hold in her brain. “I’m, I’m not feeling well,” she called, trying to distort her clear natural soprano into something feeble and stricken.

  There was a moment’s silence. The rumble of voices: more conferring. Then a new voice, a woman’s: “This is Officer Soto, Mrs. Gargano. We’re very sorry to hear that you’re ill, but you stand in violation of the law and this is no small matter. If you refuse to cooperate we’ll have no recourse but to obtain a warrant, do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” she bleated, putting everything she had into the subterfuge of her voice. “I don’t want any trouble—I just want the best for my … my babies. But I’m not dressed yet, I’m not, really. If you come back later I’ll let you in—”

  Officer Kraybill: “Promise?”

  She’d never let them in. She’d die first. Set the house afire and take her babies with her. “Yes,” she called. “I promise.”

  Another silence. Then the voices, consulting. “All right,” Officer Soto said finally, “you’ve got twenty-four hours. We’ll be back here tomorrow morning at eight A.M. sharp, and there’ll be no more of this business, do you hear? We’ll have a warrant with us.”

  Grace watched them leave through a crack in the curtains. There was a cockiness to their gait that irritated her—even the woman walked like a football player. She watched them climb into the cab of a truck big enough to take away all her babies at once and haul them off to some Fish and Game compound, some concentration camp somewhere. It made her heart pound even to think about it.

  But she wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot. This wasn’t Nazi Germany, this was America, and if they thought they were going to just walk in and trample all over her rights, they had another think coming. Before they’d turned the corner, Grace had Jet on the phone.

  Jet didn’t know the first thing about U-Haul trucks and she was afraid to drive anything that big anyway, so she called up Vincent at work—he was bartending till closing—and asked him if he’d meet her at her place when he got off. She’d managed to get the thing as far as her apartment, but that was only six blocks from the. rental office, in light traffic and with no turns or stoplights—getting it all the way over to her mother’s was something else altogether. Vincent didn’t sound too happy about the whole proposition—she wasn’t exactly overjoyed herself—but there it was.

  It was past eleven when he came up the walk to her apartment—business had been slow and he’d closed up early—and she was out the door in a hooded sweatshirt before he could ring the bell. She fell into his arms and groped at him a bit while they kissed, and then she held up the keys to the truck. Vincent was tall and bone-thin, with a high-stacked pompadour and long sideburns and a fading green tattoo on the left side of his neck. The tattoo was homemade and it was so old and shapeless you couldn’t really tell what it was—Vincent said he’d done it with a couple of friends one night when he was fifteen or sixteen, he couldn’t remember exactly. “And what’s it supposed to be?” she’d asked him when they first met. He’d shrugged. “It didn’t really come out,” he said. “Yeah,” she said. “And so?” He shrugged again. “It’s supposed to be Donatello—you know, the Ninja Turtles?”

  Tonight, he just climbed into the truck, shaking his head. “Nobody would believe me if I told them what we were doing here,” he said, “—I mean, safehouses for squirrels? Or maybe we should call them safeholes or something.” The truck started up then with a rumbling clatter, as if there were nothing under the hood but iron filings and cheap aluminum fans. Vincent jerked at the gearshift, and the lights of a passing car isolated his look of bemusement, a look Jet found irresistible. They kissed again, a long lingering kiss, and she assured him he’d have his reward—later.

  Grace blinked the porchlight twice when they pulled up in front of the house, then all the lights went out. A moment later she joined them in the driveway, a tiny figure dressed all in black. “Shh,” she warned as they stepped down from the truck, “they could be watching—you never know.”

  Vincent hunched his shoul
ders in his leather jacket and lit a cigarette. Jet had brought him to the house to meet her mother two weeks ago, and after making him what she called a highball with some of the V.S.O.P. bourbon she’d inherited from Jet’s father, Grace had taken him out to the garage and introduced him to each and every one of her thirty-odd squirrels—and of course there was a story behind each of them, a long and detailed story. Vincent had taken it pretty well—at least nothing showed on his face as far as Jet could see—but now he said, “Who? Who’d be watching at this hour?”

  “Shhhh!” Grace clamped a hand round Vincent’s arm and pressed a finger to her lips. “You don’t want to know,” she whispered, and then they were following her into the garage, where the squirrels greeted them with a vigorous whirring of their exercise wheels and the usual rising odor of dank fermentation that Jet could only liken to the smell of the shower room in high school.

  They worked by the ghostly glimmer of two nightlights, all the illumination her mother would risk, and as Jet and Vincent hauled the big awkward wire cages out the door and stacked them in the back of the truck, Grace hovered at their elbows, urging them to be extra careful with this one and to set that one down easy and not to disturb Molly or Lucretius or whoever. The last three cages contained her favorites, the squirrels that seemed to mean more to her than Jet or her father or anyone ever had—Phil, Misty and Bruno. These were the ones she gave the run of the house to and they were destined for Jet’s apartment, an arrangement that Jet had decidedly mixed feelings about, even though her mother assured her that it would only be for a week or so and that she’d be there every day to look after them herself. “Careful! Careful!” Grace cried as they bob-bled the last cage, their fingers numb with the cold and the impress of the wire. “Oh, Philly, you poor baby, mamakins is going to look after you, yes she is—”

  When they’d loaded him in and shut the door, Grace broke down. “Ma,” Jet pleaded, but her mother began to sob and she had to wrap her arms round her and rock her back and forth while Vincent lit an impatient cigarette and fiddled with the collar of his jacket.