Everything but the Squeal

fowl, said Marty.

I was sure that I didn't want to talk to Marty. In addition to the bustling kitchen crew, who didn't have time to talk to anybody, there were three young Hispanic women who took the orders, largely ignoring Marty. I might have spoken to them, but didn't: it was only Thursday, the third day since Mrs. Sorrell had paid the ransom for Aimee, and I couldn't risk starting anything. I had a full day to go.

So I choked down my lg. soft drink and picked at my three-pak and hefted my biscuit, which might have been made out of reconstituted iron filings, and tried to figure out what, if anything, was going on.

At the table across from me a family of four, Vietnamese immigrants from the look and sound of them, were working their way through a meal that at least some of them would surely regret. The mother and father, both of them brown and delicate, stared dolefully at their plates, obviously missing their noodles and their odorous but delicious fish sauce, but the kids tucked in with the gleeful appetites of new Americans. They were, as near as I could tell, a boy and a girl. Both of the children had come back from the counter wearing paper chicken masks that terminated in little yellow beaks just below their noses and paper chicken bibs decorated with printed feathers. I was trying to determine how old they were when I realized that the mother was staring at me. As a rule, Vietnamese don't stare. It's considered impolite. I smiled at her, and saw that the father was staring at me too. I'd been looking too long at their children.

“Beautiful kids,” I said.

The father glanced at the mother and then returned my smile. “How you knowing?” he asked. “Them look like bird.”

“A boy and a girl, right?”

“This one girl,” he said, pulling at the mask on the child nearer to me. A pert little face peeked brownly out at me and then the child reached up a hand made of fragile bird-bones and firmly replaced her mask. “Other one boy,” the father said. He looked happy not to have to eat. “Boy number one.”

“Firstborn?” I asked. The boy, who was gnawing at a wing that could have come off a pterodactyl, was marginally larger.

“Number one,” the father repeated. “Born Vietnam.”

“Where in Vietnam?”

The father grew watchful. For all he knew I was a Vietnam burnout with an Uzi under my shirt. “You been Vietnam?” he asked carefully.

“No,” I said, “but I hear it is very beautiful.”

“Was,” he said, still on guard. “Near Hue.”

“Hue.” I had no idea where that was.

“Farm,” he said. “Cows and chickens. Chickens not like this.” He gestured at his plate.

“No chicken was ever like this,” I said.

“American chicken no good,” said his wife with the air of one who was testing her English. She sat back at the end of the sentence and allowed herself a private smile. She'd talked to an American. She had a story to tell when she got back to the Vietnamese enclave in what used to be Chinatown. It was now one of several Little Saigons. The Chinese had moved to Monterey Park.

“I like it,” the boy said from behind his mask. His English was as unaccented as mine. “Hell, I think it's great.”

“Language,” his father said reprovingly. “Watching language, please.”

“Let me see your face,” I said to the boy. He pulled up his mask and let it rest on his forehead. A lock of straight black hair was captured beneath it. Two dark eyes winked out at me like raisins in a rice pudding. He was about nine.

“You like this better than Vietnamese chicken?” I asked.

“Vietnamese chicken stinks,” he said. “I'm an American. My name is Tony.”

Tony's parents looked at him with loss in their eyes. His mother said something in Vietnamese. Even his sister stared at him, her paper beak turning in his direction.

“Um,” I said, and then the conversation was interrupted by a high-pitched squabble from the counter.

Two boys were fighting. The one parent with them, the mother, tossed out pleading smiles in all directions as the boys threw looping roundhouse punches at each other. At issue, it would seem, was a torn, brightly colored piece of paper. Each of them had approximately half of it in his hand. The smaller of the two fell to the floor in self- defense and clutched his half of the trophy to his stomach. The larger boy administered what looked like a persuasive kick to the smaller one's backside.

“Whoa,” said an adult male's voice, and I saw the big rooster named Marty wade into the fray. “What's the problem here?”

“Willie took my mask,” said the little one, still hunched over. Outraged righteousness rang in his voice.

“Forget it,” Marty said gruffly from under his rubber rooster's comb.

“But it's mme,” the little one said. “Willie is a dork.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Marty laughed with all the rich and hearty sincerity of a Macy's Santa. “We got lots of them.” He snapped his fingers in the direction of the nearest of the Hispanic girls, and she reached under the counter and came up with what looked like fifty chicken masks.

“Two,” Marty said with a new note of command in his voice. “Two, stupid.” He apparently couldn't be bothered with remembering her name, even though it said Alicia on her name tag.

Blushing in anger, Alicia dropped all but two of the masks under the counter and handed the pair to the big rooster. Then, biting her underlip, she turned to the soft-drink machine and yanked the handle down, filling a cup that no one had ordered. Rooster Marty kept a watchful eye on her as he handed the masks to the two boys, giving each of them an awkward, ham-handed pat on the head. Then he turned his head and looked at me. He'd looked at me before.

“Sorry,” I said to the Vietnamese couple, “I think I've had enough chicken.” I got up and headed for the sidewalk.

Watery sunlight sparkled off leftover Easter decorations in the shops as I walked east, toward Western Boulevard. Western, as its name suggests, used to be the western edge of L.A.; now it's somewhere in the middle. The foot traffic here was made up of the class of Los Angeles residents who don't own cars: bus stops were crowded with stolid, fatalistic-looking Hispanic women going to, or coming home from, domestic jobs, and street crazies mumbled and jabbered their messages to the world, walking as though they were propelled by a system of contradictory and overwound springs. Out-of-work men sat on the low wall surrounding a parking lot, talking and smoking cigarettes. Women and children went in and out of a discount shoe store or stared longingly at the large- screen color television sets in the windows of an appliance-rental center. It was the kind of neighborhood where people rented things. Several children who had either been parked in front of the window by their mothers or had gathered of their own accord gazed gravely at the images on the screen.

This was a neighborhood in its last throes. Above the little run-down thrift shops and clinicasmedicos and four-story apartments, the new office building next to the Cap'n's loomed like a coppery finger pointing toward the future. The neighborhood in which these people lived and worked and raised children was a tax deduction for incorporated dentists on some business manager's books in Beverly Hills, and somewhere some computer was running a rentals-versus-land-values equation that would eventually bring in the bulldozers and then the architects and steelworkers and concrete pourers, and, penultimately, the interior decorators. Then would come the executives and junior executives in their BMW's and Cherokees, most of them white, and the old brown neighborhood would recede north and south, away from the Boulevard and into the decaying side streets, and finally it would pull up stakes completely and reroot itself somewhere farther east and south, wherever the accountants' equation translated into Let the Neighborhood Go. I preferred this one the way it was, full of noisy, sloppy life spilling onto the sidewalks, quarreling and laughing and spending and dreaming and falling in love and shooting each other on occasion.

The thought of BMW's made me stop walking. Children were expensive merchandise. People didn't pick up expensive merchandise in dumped, primered Plymouths from the mid-sixties. The place to be was Cap'n Cluckbucket's parking lot. I went the long way around the block and retrieved Alice. Then I changed my shirt, put on my Jerry Lewis glasses, black horn-rims with white adhesive tape over the nose, combed my hair forward, and drove Alice into the Cap'n's lot.

With a tray of chicken so oily that Saudi Arabia would have gone to war for the mineral rights and yet another