Everything but the Squeal

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 treschic. 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

Jessica 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?”