Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

She closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again. She was drunker than I was. “Who's Tallulah Bankhead?” she asked.

“A dangerous amphibian,” I said. “Aurora. Tell me what happened.”

Her chin crumpled up like aluminum foil and she dropped her head. Two wet spots fell onto the brown skin of her thigh and glistened up at me. Without having any idea what I was doing, I reached out and brushed them away. Her hair hung forward, masking her face.

“My mother's purse,” she said in a muffled voice. “Over there, near the chair. Can you get it, please?”

Acting on automatic pilot, I got the purse and came back to the couch. I put the purse on the coffee table. “And?” I asked.

She took a shaky drag off the cigarette. “And open it, stupid,” she said without looking up. “It's right on top.”

I pulled the purse open and found myself looking at more stuff than the average man packs when he's going abroad for the rest of his life. “You've got to give me a hint,” I said. “This is King Tut's tomb. This is a time capsule. Anybody who finds this purse a thousand years from now will know all there is to know about Western civilization.”

“Western civilization is a joke,” she said. “There's no such thing as civilization. There's just table manners.”

She grabbed the purse and dug into it. “You want to see civilization?” she asked in a strangled tone. “You want to hear civilization?” She pulled out the little tape recorder and a cassette and fumbled around with them, trying to insert the tape into the player.

“I've heard this,” I said.

“Just shut up. I'm so damned sick of people who know what's going to happen next. You don't know which way your rear end is pointed,” she said, snapping the cassette player shut with a nasty little click. “Not that anyone cares.”

“Slow down,” I said. I touched her hand. “And before you play that thing, give me a drink.”

She tilted her face toward me. It was wet and shiny. “Good idea,” she said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand like she was trying to rub off a tattoo. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, reaching to the floor behind her and coming up with a bottle. “We're both just kids.”

“Who?”

She drank deeply. She'd graduated to cognac. “Everybody,” she said, passing the bottle. “Aimee and me. You and me. Why would anyone think you could find anything? My mother and me. She's not so old either, you know.” Her face wrinkled and she collapsed backward onto the couch. “Ohhhh, foooey ” she wailed, covering her eyes with a forearm. “Fooey, fooey, fooey.”

The cognac was rawer than scraped bark. I had to swallow twice to make sure it would stay down, and even then it reached up with little fingers of fume to chin itself on my uvula. After it subsided and went about the business of lighting up my stomach, I leaned forward and pressed the button that made the little black machine play whatever it was that needed playing.

There was nothing. Just a hiss like a long-distance phone wire. Aurora made a little choking sound and waved at the machine, and I pushed Rewind.

The tape snicked into place and I looked up to find Aurora staring at it as though it were something fanged and poisonous. “Do you want to go into the other room while I play it?” I asked.

She shook her head, her underlip caught between her teeth. Her face was a mask of taut muscle. “Play it,” she said.

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?”

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?”