Everything but the Squeal
( Simeon Grist - 2 )
Timothy Hallinan
Timothy Hallinan
Everything but the Squeal
The curious life cycle of the botfly begins with an egg laid on a mammal's lip or fur. When the egg is licked and swallowed, its coating dissolves and a voracious larva is freed to float in the juices of the stomach. Eventually it begins to eat its way out, gaining weight as it goes. When it reaches the surface, usually through a flat muscle, the baby fly leaves behind an exit wound about the size of a.22 caliber bullet.
— Frederick Wendt, An Entomologist'sNotebook
Home is where you hang your head. -Groucho Marx
Oh, the little chickie hollered,
And the little chickie begged,
And they poured hot water
Up and down his leg. …
— Traditional American children's song
I
The Little Chickie Hollered
1 — Looking for Aimee
“H ey! No, no, no, no, no. How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You gitouta here. Gitouta here.” The Mountain's wooden geta sandals clattered over the concrete as he grabbed the Guitar Player by the frayed strap of the unstrung, bogus Stratocaster guitar he toted up and down Santa Monica Boulevard day and night. The Guitar Player's eyes, which had been closed in temporary bliss, opened as wide as they could, which is to say halfway, as the Mountain-three hundred quivering pounds of food-stained plaid shirt, scrubby beard, and yellow fangs-yanked him to his feet and launched him toward the sidewalk. The neck of the guitar knocked to the floor the dingy plastic tray containing the Guitar Player's cardinal sin: a package of store-bought sliced ham that he'd been surreptitiously dipping into somebody else's side order of the special teriyaki sauce, the one that Tommy, the Mountain's Okinawan boss, used only for teriyaki tacos.
There was no house rule against leaving leftovers for others-not much ever made it back into the kitchen-but bringing in food from outside was tantamount to kamikaze.
The eighty-six, which was part of the nightly floor show at the Oki-Burger, caught people's attention as though it were something new. At the other end of the Guitar Player's picnic-type table, the Toothless Man-two missing in front, top and bottom, nodded his head. “Maximum force,” he aspirated approvingly to the Young Old Woman, fourteen years old from behind and fifty from in front. The Young Old Woman, the only one who could understand him most of the time, cackled. She translated his conversation for the others and made his alibis to the cops. His speaking-tongue dog was what the others called her. When she wasn't being his speaking-tongue dog she worked the darker doorways with her back to the street, giving unpleasant surprises to fools on the prowl for pubescence.
One of the genuine teenage girls, seated at a table strategically near the sidewalk where a glimpse of her might make a straight hit the brakes, paused in a heroin nod-out long enough to giggle as the Mountain dispassionately lobbed the Guitar Player across the sidewalk and onto the back of a concrete bus bench. At the last possible instant, as he did almost every night, the Guitar Player managed to twist his body so that his ribs, rather than the imitation Stratocaster, cracked against the edge of the bench. “Wuff,” he said. He straightened up, wrapped himself in a tenuous shred of affronted dignity, and set off down the street toward the sheltering hedges of Plummer Park. The kids did a lot of business in Plummer Park.
The nodding girl continued to exceed the limits of her body's chemical tolerance long enough to giggle again and say something to an equally loaded friend through what sounded like a mouthful of highly glutinous mush. Me, I just took a sip on my very old Diet Coke and a sniff at my even older purple T-shirt and wondered how long it would be before everybody stopped thinking I was a cop.
It was three a.m. at Tommy's Oki-Burger, and all was as well as it was going to get. A little earlier the clatter of silverware two bright orange tables away had announced the fact that a skinhead in black leather had hit the bottom of the curve on downers. He'd bounced twice on the cement floor, and the Mountain had hauled him into the men's room to be treated to a refreshing dip in the toilet. A girl had broken out in bugs that no one else could see, and the Mountain had sprayed her with an imaginary can of Raid to calm her down. It worked. The LAPD cruised slowly by every fifteen minutes or so, one of them checking out the girls and trying to keep his tongue from hanging out the window while the other one drove. They switched seats and tongues on alternate passes.
“To protect and to serve,” the Mountain read off the side of the squad car, mopping down the table with a malodorous rag that might have been a recycled mummy wrapping. “Who they protecting, you think?”
“Each other,” I said. To my great relief, my Diet Coke had finally dried up. I pushed the empty cup away as though it had contained uranium.
“And who they serving?” The Mountain picked up the empty cup and rattled it and then snapped the rag at a fly guilty of being out after curfew. A vaguely cheesy and thoroughly unwholesome smell spread its leprous wings beneath my nose.
“They're not serving Diet Coke,” I said, fanning the vapor away. “And you're not either, not if you've got any pity in your soul. God, there must be something else to drink in this dump.”
The Mountain lowered his voice. “Don't spread it around,” he said, narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, “but I could offer you Diet Pepsi. And anyway, what do plainclothes cops care?”
On the whole, I liked the Mountain. He eighty-sixed people with style and he rarely held a grudge. I'd been hanging around the Oki-Burger four days and I'd told him at least twelve times that I wasn't a cop. I told him again now, scratching at my chin. My carefully cultivated four-day beard itched.
The Mountain gave me a knowing look and wiped his face with the damp mummy-wrap, making my skin crawl. “Nobody as grungy as you isn't a cop,” he said. “Whyn’t you go to Jack's? They're not as sharp there. You might pass for a human.”
I knew good advice when I heard it. I hauled my backside off the hardest wooden bench this side of bankruptcy court and headed for Jack's.
Jack's Triple-Burgers is on Hollywood, near La Brea, and Tommy's Oki-Burger is on Fountain, near Fairfax. It's easy to map the physical geography-they're about a mile and a half apart, and Jack's is farther north and east than Tommy's-but the emotional geography is more subtle. It had taken me a couple of days to figure out that Tommy's got the new runaways and Jack's got the Old Hands. The drugs of choice in Tommy's are downers, mainly codeine and other painkillers, but at Jack's nobody screws around with anything you don't enjoy at the sharp point of a needle. The occasional exceptions in both places are freebasers, folks whose idea of a day at the beach is a waterpipe filled with a brain-jolting mixture of cocaine and ether and, occasionally, PCP. The freebasers are rare in both establishments, though. Cocaine makes you alert and jumpy. By and large, both Tommy's and Jack's cater to a crowd that puts a high value on anesthesia.
The other difference is that the boys and girls at Tommy's sometimes-say no to a straight. He has to be pretty repulsive and not very prosperous-looking, and he's probably asking for something that would stun the Marquis de Sade, but the kids will say no. The boys and girls at Jack's don't. At Jack's, “Just say no” is a punch line.
To get to Jack's, I took the streets no one knows are there. Between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards there runs a network of narrow, pinched little avenues, paved when cars were smaller, and lined on either side by small houses, mostly stucco, built in the thirties. They were dark now, most of them, tucked away behind weedy lawns, climbing roses, and chained dogs. Here and there light spilled through a window, and at one point I heard the sad str
ains of Brahms' Double Concerto. There were few families. Most of the children in these neighborhoods come and go with the night, passing back and forth between the boulevards where the money is, looking at the houses from the wrong side of the chain-link fences.
I'd parked Sweet Alice, my car, on Cherokee, about halfway between Tommy's and Jack's. I won her in a game of chance that had begun in Malibu, not far from where I live, and ended in Pacoima. Her flamboyantly mustachioed owner, one Jaime, had painted her an indelible shade of iridescent horsefly blue, lowered her so far in front that she would have bounced going over a pack of Luckies, and hung a surrealistically large pair of furry dice from her rearview mirror. I'd removed the dice by way of expressing my individuality. Other than that I'd kept her, as they say in the used-car trade, as is. I patted her on the fender as I passed her and headed on up to Jack's. The sodium lights of Hollywood Boulevard gleamed luridly against the low-hanging April clouds. Jack's and the Boulevard were up the street, and Easter was around the corner.
Jack's squats on what L.A. realtors call a corner lot. Hollywood Boulevard runs vaguely east-west, and Gardner, the north-south street, culminates to the north in what the same L.A. realtors call a cul-de-sac. In English, that's a dead end. Normally, a cul-de-sac is regarded as an especially safe configuration by couples with young children. There weren't many couples on that little stretch of Gardner, but for the children who patronized the place, it was a terrific place to shoot up.
A heaviness in the air told me that it was about to drizzle. The week's weather had been all over the map. Normally in L.A., the weather is as orderly, and about as interesting, as a family tree: warm blue day breeds warm blue day. But this April, counting down toward Easter, was made up of days that arrived like runaways from other climates. The week had begun as clear and cold as North Dakota and then turned warm as a mass of tropical air wheeled up from Baja. Wednesday was marked by a chilly rain that had obviously made a wrong turn on its way to San Francisco and then decided it liked L.A. long enough to hang around through Thursday.
The drizzle started as I hit the Boulevard. At this hour, probably eighty percent of the people in Hollywood were holding, loaded, on illegal errands, or all three. There was the usual complement of parked bikers sneering on their black-and-chrome hogs, surrounded by the usual flock of biker girls. They were there day and night.
“So?” said Muhammad, the counterman. Unlike Tommy's, where there is a Tommy, there's no Jack at Jack's. The place was bought by Koreans several years ago, and the help is all either Hispanic or generically Middle Eastern. Muhammad was a generic Iranian.
“Coffee,” I said, sitting down. My back hurt. I was getting old for this stuff.
“How many sugars?” Muhammad said. Junkies eat a lot of sugar.
“Four,” I said, trying to turn my wince into a smile.
“You want fudge, say so,” Muhammad said. It was his standard rejoinder. I was too frayed for standard rejoinders, so I leaned across the counter and took his skinny black tie in my hand as he turned away. He jerked his head back to me, looking alarmed.
“If I want fudge,” I said, “I'll mug the Good Humor man. Give me a coffee with four sugars, and clamp the stirrer between your teeth until I leave.”
“Jesus,” Muhammad said, tugging at his tie, “what's with you tonight?”
“Lip,” I said, giving the tie a little yank. “There's too much lip on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“So call the Lip Squad,” he said. He wrapped the tie around his fist and pulled it free. Against my will, I laughed, and he gave me a bleak smile. “I'm tired too,” he said. “If I rub my face one more time tonight I think I'll hit bone.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Make it a large coffee. And hold the sugar.”
The smile went wise. “Knew you were a cop,” he said.
I gave up and drank it. Five years ago, no one would have taken me for a cop. I was obviously getting older. Behind me a fifteen-year-old girl fought fuzzily with her pimp. “I left them in the jar by the bed,” she said. “You didn't have to take them all.”
“Girl,” the pimp said, “there wasn't enough for both of us. You should be happy they made me happy.”
“You're a pig,” she said.
I heard a gagging, snuffling noise and turned to see the pimp push the girl's dish of soft ice cream into her face. He clamped the back of her head with one hand and held the dish over her nose and mouth with the other while she choked and kicked her feet under the table. “You want a extra mouth,” he said, “open the one you already got one more time.” He sat back and regarded her. Ice cream ran down her chin and neck, onto the lavender cloth of her cheap blouse. She began to cry.
I leaned forward onto the counter, rested my head on my arms, and listened to my heart beat in my ears. It almost drowned out the sound of the girl's sobbing. Once I might have wrapped the pimp's chair around his neck. That was a long time ago, four full days. After four days spending time with kids who had an average life expectancy of only three more years, all I wanted to do was drink my coffee and go home.
The girl kept on crying while the pimp finished her ice cream. I rubbed my chin bristle and felt sorry for myself. Four numbing days and nights, and not a glimpse or a whisper of Aimee Sorrell.
2 — Over the Rainbow
T hey called each other Mommy and Daddy, but it was sheer force of habit. The tone of voice into which the marriage had finally settled was scratchy and raw, a couple of light-years on the wrong side of polite. Basically, they were restraining the impulse to begin their remarks to each other, Oki-Burger style, with “HEY!”
They'd showed up at the bottom of my driveway six days before I'd made my first unconvincing appearance at the Oki-Burger, and the weather had just begun its runaway act. It was gray and crappy outside, neither raining nor not raining. Wood snapped and sputtered optimistically in the stove that heats the place. Mommy and Daddy, faced with a slate-gray day and a private detective with dubious credentials, were both trying to be good. They were working overtime to project the public image of their marriage, the image that satisfied their country club in Kansas City, and it was obviously something of an effort.
She had the ironclad serenity that comes with years of putting up with things. He had the kind of enforced control that builds permanent knuckle-size muscles in the corners of the jaw. You sometimes see them in military men. The muscles were well on the way to being thumb-size, even though I'd cleaned up the place before they arrived. If I hadn't, they'd probably have stuck out like Boris Karloff s neck plugs. He also had wet-looking hair, a rawboned bunchy face, and a tiny disapproving mouth. Mommy was smoother and probably tougher, although she didn't look it. She looked like hugging her would be like falling into a tub of very good butter. “Her name is Aimee,” she said, spelling it just like that. No shortcuts here. They'd used all the vowels they could think of, and thrown in a couple extra for good measure.
“Ah,” I'd said, wishing they would leave. “Coffee, anyone?” I was on my fifth cup. Three to fuel the effort of cleaning the living room and two to deal with Mommy and Daddy. Missing children are not my specialty, not by a long shot. If they want to stay missing, they will. And even if you hit enough dumb luck to find them, how do you know whether you should send them home? Home is a generic word. It can mean where the heart is or where the horror is. Looking at Daddy, I wasn't ready to guess which it had been for Aimee.
“No coffee,” Mommy said, pushing down gently on my wrist. I put the cup back on the table, and she allowed her hand to remain on mine. “And don't blame me for the name.” Despite the gentleness of her touch, as she turned her gaze to Daddy there was enough acid in her tone to etch glass. “All their names begin with A. His name is Alan, you see.”
There were two boys, she said, and another girl. She spelled their names. Wherever possible, they all had extraneous vowels tucked here and there, sad little head starts on distinction. She finished the litany and looked over at him out of luminous blue eyes. “I
sn't that cute?” she said to me. He concentrated on the bright squares of his plaid madras sport coat, paying particular attention to a kelly-green area on his right cuff.
“Aimee’s the youngest,” I said neutrally. It was Saturday, and I wanted to be out of the house.
“She's the baby,” Mommy said. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her, just a slender, expensively maintained woman well-wrapped in a sleeveless dress, long delicate tendons in her forearms, a big sapphire glittering on one hand, as dry and bright as her eyes. “She's also the problem child.”
Daddy grunted something that could have been a negative. It could also have been gas.
“How do you know she ran away?”
“Well, she's missing.” She gave me the cool blue eyes full-bore. Daddy fidgeted impatiently in his chair, plucking at a button.
“As opposed to, well, foul play,” I said. Inwardly I cursed Janie Gordon, whom I'd once brought kicking and screaming home to her mother, for telling her distant cousins the Sorrells where I lived and what a whiz I was.
“She left a note, of sorts,” Mommy said. “Aimee’s not much of a writer.” She reached into the enormous Louis Vuitton purse on the floor at her feet and pulled out a much-creased piece of paper. Mommy, it read, I alwayshateditwhenyouplayedyourfartyoldmusic. AbunchofoldgeezersactingliketheirYoung. Butthere'sonesongIlike. PushPlay.
“Play?” I said.
“This is pretty cute,” Mommy said with obscure pride. “I have to give Aimee credit for it.”
Out of the purse came a little chrome cassette player. She put it on the coffee table in front of me. “It's the big black button,” she said. I pushed it.
Paul McCartney's voice, distorted by the small speaker, sang the opening verse of “She's Leaving Home.” When he got to the words “stepping outside, she is free,” there was a click, and a young girl's voice, too close to the microphone, said, “Here's another one.” Four raucous, unmistakable guitar chords, and even before I heard the singer's voice, I knew it was the Kinks.
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