by T. C. Boyle
Nobody ever knocked at the door, except Brenda and sometimes Father Curran – and Guy, that first night. Guy, she thought, and she could see his face, see the lean defined outline of him, his smile, his hair, the distressed bomber jacket he wore in cold weather, but it wasn’t Guy and it was never going to be Guy, she knew that. She thought of Brenda next, even as the knock came again, this time a little firmer, a little less patient, and Sam stiffened. ‘Trick or treat?’ a muffled voice called and she relaxed.
There were five people gathered under the yellow beam of her porch light, four of them at ground level, and one – a tall, heavy big-bellied man she recognised from the next row over – on the top step, one hand clutching a beer mug, the other arrested in the act of applying his knuckles to the door frame. All five of them – they were drunk, that was instantly clear – called out a ragged ‘Trick or Treat?’ in what was, as she would later learn, a Desert Haven tradition on Halloween, going trailer to trailer with a mug and begging to have it topped off with whatever the inhabitants had handy, all in the name of a good time and getting thoroughly sloshed. Which was fine, or would have been fine, as long as she didn’t have to invite them in or be expected to make conversation beyond the usual pleasantries, and she foresaw infusing whatever they were drinking with a healthy splash of gin apiece – Halloween – but that didn’t happen. Because the man on the porch, the big man, whose name was J.J. Burnside and who had his own eponymous muffler repair shop on Stockton Hill Road, was dressed as a pirate – they were all pirates, three men and two women, her neighbours, enjoying themselves – and had made the unfortunate choice to wear an ersatz eyepatch over his left eye.
In the instant it took her to process all this, Sam let out a scream and flew at the man, and though she managed to hook an arm round Sam’s throat and tried to jerk him back, the damage was done – he hit the man like a heat-seeking missile, and the man dropped his drink, threw out his arms and fell backwards down the steps. There was a shout, a curse, a gabble of voices. Sam could have flung her aside and gone after him, could have done worse, much worse, but he felt the presence of her, the grip of her arms, both her arms clutching him to her now with all her strength, and in the moment of decision, he pulled back and let her hold him. One of the men shouted, ‘Son of a bitch!’ and a woman’s voice hissed, ‘Jesus!’ in a long expiring breath. The last thing she saw before she wrestled Sam back in the house and slammed the door shut was J.J. Burnside sprawled on his back in the gravel, while the shadows of the four others swelled and jerked against the reflection of the yellow light on the pale dun backdrop of the boulders behind them.
THE TASTE OF GOD
God was up in the sky. God was good. God loved everybody. And No Legs was God’s special friend and messenger, and he brought COOKIES with him when he came to visit, which was the taste of God, or at least that was the natural assumption. No Legs was harmless and weak and no threat to Aimee or him or anybody else. And No Legs was learning to make words with his hands so they could talk about what was visible and what wasn’t, and he sometimes understood what the man was getting at, at least partly, because if he closed his eyes he could still see things and in his dreams he could see them too. And God had a PENIS, just like him. Did God get stiff the way he did sometimes? Did God know Aimee? Did God ever come down from the sky? Was God a bird?
No Legs sat there at the kitchen table, grinning at him and Aimee, and it wasn’t like the lessons she and Guy used to put him through, which were tedious and repetitive, but something that stirred him and invited him into a new world altogether. One time she blindfolded him and handed him objects – one of his BLOCKS with the raised letters on them, letter A, for Aimee; a TOWEL; a STICK – and asked him to identify them even though he couldn’t see them. That was easy. No Legs grinned. Aimee grinned. And there was a banana in it for him.
This was his world now and it was secure in its routines, waking beside her, eating breakfast at the table with her, going OUT, going in the CAR, eating dinner and watching TV, and on the nights when she was working, sleeping in his special BED in the CAR. He didn’t concern himself about the shape of his feet any more or the BLACK BUGS or anything else but there were times when he remembered the past and then the PAIN was present with him. That was what had happened on Halloween when the man came to the door with the hole cut out of his head, and the past was the now and he was AFRAID.
The next day, or maybe another day, maybe a day after that, Brenda came to the trailer, and she was stiff and cold and didn’t greet him or stroke his ears or offer him a treat. Aimee gave her tea, same as with No Legs, only he didn’t sit at the table with them but on the couch, looking through his magazines, Playboy especially, his favourite, because there were no clothes in Playboy, and they were all females and sometimes they looked like Aimee.
Brenda said, ‘I don’t care because we just can’t have another incident like this. He thought he’d broke his ankle, till they X-rayed it, but you saw him – he’s still hobbling around and there’s no excuse for that.’
Aimee said something back to her but he wasn’t listening. The pictures were boring – he’d seen them all before. He clicked the TV on and immediately the screen came to life with a line of CARS racing around in a circle, and Aimee said, ‘Turn it down, Sam, it’s too loud,’ and he fumbled with the button, but that only made it louder, till she got up from the table and took it from him and clicked it and clicked it again till the noise of the CARS was just a whisper. ‘Now you be good,’ she said, as if that meant anything. ‘I’m talking to Brenda, OK?’
They talked with their voices and he followed along till it bored him, and then he got up and started banging his toy dog against the wall till she told him he was being too loud, and he went into his room and banged it there. He could still hear them, their voices rising and falling, and he began to feel jealous because why was Aimee talking to her when she could be talking to him?
Brenda said, ‘There’s plenty of other trailer courts around.’
Aimee said, ‘You know Sam. You know he behaves himself. The man just startled him, that’s all. We were minding our own business. It was Halloween. We were watching Frankenstein.’
‘Yes, but there are legal issues involved, you must know that—’
Aimee said, ‘Give us another chance. Please?’
ON THE ONE HAND
On the one hand, what happened to J.J. was his own fault – he was drunk, he was on Aimee’s top step, and Sam perceived him as a threat – but on the other hand, if there was no Sam, if Brenda hadn’t rented to Aimee in the first place, then J.J. wouldn’t be hobbling around on crutches and threatening to sue not just Aimee but her too for allowing a dangerous animal to be kept on the premises. Millie Vogel had been there that night, also drunk, along with J.J. and his wife, Cindy, and Jimmy Everton, and she said she’d never been so scared in her life. ‘I told you somebody was going to get hurt, didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?’ And it wasn’t just Millie and the Burnsides – half the court was up in arms. Even Gary said, ‘Look, I know J.J.’s full of shit, and I don’t know the law or what our liability is, but maybe it’s time to think about Aimee finding some other park to move her trailer to.’
‘What’s Father Curran going to say?’
‘I don’t have a clue, but you think he’s going to kick in for damages? Raid the poor box or the crippled orphans fund or whatever? And if Sam went after J.J., who knows who he’ll go after next. I say it’s time to cut our losses.’
So she went to have a talk with Aimee, her mind half made-up, and Sam didn’t help any. He was distant, difficult, acting guilty and banging things around in the back room like an angry child, but then everything changed, when all at once he glided silently into the room, laid a hand on hers and gazed up at her out of his big chocolate eyes as if he knew, as if he was apologising. Aimee explained the whole thing, how Sam had been worked up over the movie and how no one ever came to the door, so it was totally unexpected, even on Halloween, and it wasn’
t as if she was on the Burnsides’ doorstep, right? And how all she’d ever asked since the day she moved in was for a little privacy, which was her basic right, wasn’t it?
They were seated in the breakfast nook, sharing a pot of Constant Comment, and Sam climbed up beside Aimee now, making his soft hooting noises, which was his equivalent of what a cat does when it’s purring. He produced a box of raisins and three plastic cups, which he inverted on the tabletop, then plucked a single raisin out of the box, hid it under one of the cups, shuffled them and pushed them towards her. ‘Go ahead,’ Aimee said. ‘He loves this game.’
‘The shell game,’ Brenda said, and laughed. ‘I haven’t played this since I was a kid, but let me see now, Sam, is it under’ – and she lifted the middle cup – ‘this one?’ But it wasn’t, and Sam, giving out a laugh of triumph, overturned the right one, plucked up the raisin and popped it in his mouth. Then he pushed the box of raisins across the table to her and made signs with his hands, which meant it was her turn to hide the raisin. And what was it that made her play along – and then play again and again, though he wound up beating her almost every time? The newspaper said they were making computers you could play this very game against – or chess or checkers or solitaire – but where was the charm in that? Sam was alive. You could see him thinking. And you could see the delight in his eyes when he beat you.
Finally, she said, ‘Well, I came over here to give you an ultimatum, but this is – I mean, I guess it wasn’t your fault. Or Sam’s. But you’re just going to have to keep an eagle eye on him, not that you’re not doing that already, but we can’t have people going around threatening to sue us. You hear me?’
‘Yes,’ Aimee said, ducking her head, ‘I hear you. One more chance, OK?’
Unfortunately – I told you so, Gary said – that chance evaporated almost as soon as Brenda’d granted it. At first things seemed to go back to normal and people found something else to gossip about – the DaSilvas, in #46, announced they were getting divorced and they all watched Jean load up their van with everything they owned, including their two chihuahuas and their Persian cat (whose name was either Dumbass or Lardass, she could never remember which), pull a three-point turn and wheel out of the lot for good, and one afternoon a police cruiser and a drug-sniffing dog pulled up in front of Lucy Devlin’s trailer and poked around for three or four hours, but in the final analysis found nothing incriminating – but then, on a dreary socked-in weekday when everybody was focusing on the holidays and she herself was at Smith’s picking up her Thanksgiving turkey and a long list of items any one of which, if overlooked, would ruin the dinner for five she was planning in honour of Gary’s mother, who was flying in for the occasion, Sam got loose.
It was like this: Aimee was asleep, though it was past noon, exhausted from her night job, which didn’t get her in till two or three in the morning. And Sam, who kept trying to wake her so they could go do something, get out of the house, climb the mesa, go to McDonald’s or hike the wash or just drive around with the windows down and the breeze fanning his face, got bored. He watched cartoons for as long as he could stand it, found his paints where she’d hidden them in the secret recess under the floorboards in the kitchen closet and painted for a while, finished off a box of Lucky Charms and a bag of stale raisin muffins and then idly poked through the drawers till he came up with the Phillips screwdriver, which intrigued him, especially since the crank window in the living room with the smudged glass panels and shiny silver screens was held in place by screws that had just exactly the same pattern on them as the screwdriver itself. Or that fit the screwdriver, anyway. He couldn’t get out the door – Aimee had seen to that, reinforcing it with a barred inner panel she’d hired a welder to put in – but the window was another story. He inserted the screwdriver experimentally and maybe he turned it the wrong way, maybe he tightened the screws rather than loosening them, but he was a quick study, Sam, and before long the screws were on the floor and the window frame and then the attached screen set carefully beside them.
Once he was out, once he was free, he didn’t just parade himself down the row where anybody in their yard or peering out their window could see him and raise the alarm – he was cleverer than that. As best they could reconstruct it, he must have slipped round back of the Bentons’ trailer, which was right next to Aimee’s, heard them talking or moving inside – they were retirees and both home at the time – and gone on to the trailer next to theirs, where Dolores Benvenidez, the only Mexican in the court (Mexican-American, that is, as Gary was forever correcting her), lived alone with her two cats. Dolores was at work at the time – she was a nurse in the Cancer Center, a saint, actually, who specialised in children’s oncology, a heartbreaking job if ever there was one. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t take precautions, since her trailer was one of the ones that had been broken into two years back and she had lost something like $150 cash, her TV and all her financial records, which was a nightmare. In the wake of that, she’d installed double locks on the front door and always, without fail, jammed a length of two-by-four up against the frame of the sliding doors that gave on to the deck she’d built out back.
The amazing thing was that despite all that Sam managed to get in – and without breaking anything or even making a sound that might have aroused anybody’s suspicions. Gary said he must have somehow picked the locks, though no one could be sure because in the aftermath, both locks had been put back and refastened so that Dolores didn’t notice anything amiss till she stepped inside. It wasn’t a total disaster. Nothing was broken and nothing had been stolen. But there was food scattered everywhere, the TV was on, there was a burnt Pop Tart in the toaster oven and an unflushed turd in the toilet. It was just past four in the afternoon when Dolores got home from her shift and opened the door and was confronted with the mess. The first thing she thought of was her cats, but when she called their names, there was silence, which chilled her all the more, and afraid that somebody might still be in the trailer, she slammed the door shut and came straight to the office. ‘There’s been a break-in,’ she said in a voice that not only was barely under control but had an edge of accusation in it too, as if Brenda herself was being paid to keep guard over everybody’s trailers and everything in them. ‘They trashed the place. And they might still be in there for all I know, because believe me I wasn’t about to stick around and find out—’
Brenda pushed herself up from the chair in the office, feeling more curious than anything else since the next thing Dolores told her was that the door was still locked when she’d got home and none of the windows were broken. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s have a look,’ and though she suspected it was all going to amount to nothing more than an overactive imagination on Dolores’ part, she took the precaution of slipping the snub-nosed Colt Python Gary had given her for her last birthday into her purse, because you never knew.
The day tasted like cold metal, which was the way it sometimes was when the sky was low like this, though what that was all about, she couldn’t say. She noticed a pair of vultures sliding across the sky over the bald crown of the mesa, their fringed wings dark against the clouds, and heard Gino Saks’ worthless Dobermann barking from the other end of the court, where he kept it chained outside when he went into town to empty his pockets at one saloon or another. When they came up the steps to the front porch at Dolores’ place, Dolores said, ‘See, right here? I swear I locked both these locks this morning – and they were locked ten minutes ago when I got home from work too. So you tell me—’
Brenda was no hero, and it wasn’t really her job to stick her neck out – she was the manager, not the police force – but she pulled open the door and called out, ‘Anybody here?’ two or three times and then stepped inside. Dolores’ trailer was a double-wide, with a cream-and-white colour scheme, which made it seem even roomier, and she was a meticulous housekeeper, nothing out of place, ever, but everything was turned upside down now, couch pillows on the floor, magazines wadded up and scatte
red round the room, the contents of the refrigerator and freezer dumped in a heap on the linoleum. ‘Jesus,’ Brenda said, ‘whoever it was they really made a mess. You sure you didn’t give anybody the key?’
‘No way,’ she said. ‘Never. There’s nobody I trust that much.’
So they inspected the whole place, end to end, and while thankfully, they did find the cats cowering under the bed, the mystery only deepened. There was nothing missing, except the bag of whole cranberries Dolores had had in the refrigerator for Thanksgiving and an unopened twelve-pack of Creamsicles that had been in the freezer. ‘I don’t know,’ Brenda heard herself say, thinking aloud, ‘but it looks like somebody locked a nine-year-old in here overnight,’ which was when the image of Sam first came into Brenda’s head. And sure enough, when they went outside to test the windows and look for any signs of forced entry, they found a popsicle stick on the ground in front of the door, and when they raised their eyes, they saw the next one, twenty feet away and the next one beyond that, tracing a path right back to Aimee’s trailer.
If anything, Aimee seemed resigned to what was coming. She didn’t really protest – and it wasn’t in her nature to get nasty, unlike so many of the other tenants Brenda had had to deliver bad news to over the years, but things just couldn’t go on like this and she had no choice but to give her her thirty days’ notice. At first, Aimee had no idea what she was talking about. And it wasn’t play-acting, not at all – she was genuinely baffled. Brenda had felt it would be best if Dolores kept out of it, so she was the one who took it upon herself to knock on the door and confront Aimee with the evidence, including the final popsicle stick, which was located right under the trailer’s front window, Sam’s point of egress – and, apparently, ingress. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Aimee said when Brenda knocked at the door and told her that somebody had broken into Dolores’ trailer and that that somebody was Sam. ‘He’s been here with me all day – and we haven’t gone anywhere.’ And then, to Sam, who was sunk into the couch with one of his Dr Seuss books, ‘Right, Sam?’