Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“I don't think so. Not for you, at any rate.”

“Hell,” she said, clearly disappointed. After a moment she said, “Well, anyway, it sounds like fun.”

“It does, huh?”

“More fun than Blister,” she said.

Jessica started eating the moment we got to Tommy's. The place was largely empty at first; then, as the afternoon wore on into evening, it began to fill up with the usual highly checkered crowd. The Mountain had spent most of Easter Sunday out on the blacktop parking lot, practicing Sumo wrestling with some other fat guys inside a small circle painted on the asphalt. Jessica had stopped, fascinated, as the fat guys grunted and puffed inside the circle. Finally the Mountain had forced his opponent-a Japanese who couldn't have weighed less than three hundred pounds-outside the circle. He wiped his face with the malodorous cheesecloth and scanned the small crowd that had gathered to watch. He nodded pleasantly down at me, and then his eyes traveled down to Jessica. Cowed a bit by the sheer pleasure of all that sweating male flesh, she had slipped her hand into mine.

The Mountain's face dropped. When he looked back up at me, all semblance of good feeling was gone. He looked like an ill-considered cross between Charles Manson and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Elaborately, he spat at my feet and then he turned his back on us and stepped back into the ring.

“Friend of yours?” Jessica said.

“Not anymore, it seems.” I was debating whether to tap the Mountain on the shoulder and try to explain, when he picked up a man who outweighed the average tractor-trailer semi and threw him out of the ring as though he'd been a Q-Tip. That ended the debate. Jessica and I went back inside and she started to eat.

She'd gotten up to go to the bathroom when two regulars, a couple of pre-op transsexuals, greeted each other with the highest squeals I'd heard since the Beatles played the Bowl, and sat down at the table next to me.

“Dear,” said the blond one, who was attired, despite the chill in the air, in a pair of gym shorts and a K-Mart blouse. “Dear, do you have any pants? Someone stole everything last night: my clothes, my cash, my makeup-even the good stuff, the Avon and the Clinique? Do you know what a girl has to go through to get Clinique? It's more expensive than safiron .” She lit a cigarette, ignoring the one that she'd just laid down in the ashtray.

“And almost as yellow,” her friend said, snatching up the first cigarette with the air of someone stumbling over a canteen in Death Valley.

“Yellow, yellow, marshmallow. I wouldn't mind looking like the Dragon Lady, as long as I could look like something ” the blond one said, exhaling a vehement cloud of smoke. “Look at me now, I'm so sallow. I've got circles under my eyes like the rings on a coaster, and I've got more pits than the full moon. Honey, they took everything .”

“Your aura is intact,” the other one said, scanning the street with practiced eyes.

“Beg pardon?”

“In fact, it could use a perm.” A nice-looking teenager in the street let his gaze slide off the brunette's face and went back to checking out the traffic.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

Rejected by the teenager, the other one, the brunette one with nine earrings, squinted at the blond and said, “A little psychometric Kirlian photography tells me that your roots to the nether world are in place. I can see them shimmering.”

“Well, what the hell good is that? Just look at me. Nothing on but these stupid gym shorts, loaned to me by a very active friend, and this awful blouse. Mamie Eisenhower wouldn't have worn this blouse. Honey, it's April . I'm freezing to death. I must say, I'd hoped for a bit more sympathy.”

“I've got my own problems,” the brunette said. He, or maybe she, pulled his or her tank top down to reveal two swollen nipples. “Six weeks,” he or she said, “six fucking weeks of both shots and pills, and what have I got to show for it? Mosquito bites. At this rate, I'll be almost as old as you are before I can wear a B-cup.”

“B-cup indeed,” the blond one said. “Dream on. You're talking shot glasses.”

“God, I hate Leos,” said the one with the nine earrings. She turned suddenly to me. “What sign are you?”

“I'm a Chameleon,” I said.

“In other words,” the one with the earrings said, pouting, “fuck off.”

“Not necessarily,” the blond said. “I like people who don't believe in astrology.”

“Then I'm your man,” I said, sipping at my diet asphalt.

“Wouldn't that be nice?” the blond said, leaning toward me.

“What the hell do rabbits have to do with Easter?” Jessica said loudly, sitting down and fingering the cardboard bunny stapled to the pole at the head of our table. There were similar bunnies all over the place. Someone had drawn exaggerated genitalia on the one at our table.

“Oh, my God,” the blond said, recoiling. “You're a pervert My God, she's barely pubescent.” Well, at least nobody thought I was a cop anymore.

“Are you talking about me?” Jessica demanded, sounding like the Grand Duchess of Fredonia. “Because if you are, I don't like your tone.”

“Leave her to her sugar daddy,” the one with the nine earrings said. The two of them shifted their weight and faced away from us, their surgically improved noses in the air.

“I know a guy in school who's going to end up like those two,” Jessica said in a voice that would have penetrated a foot of lead. “Maybe I should bring him down here and give him a preview of coming attractions. It might straighten him up.”

The blond started to turn back to us, and I could feel Jessica brace herself for the collision to come.

“The Easter Bunny,” I said, plucking at the air. “That's a very interesting question. On the face of it, rabbits don't seem to have much to do with the Resurrection of Christ.”

“No shit,” Jessica said, watching the blond the way a mongoose watches a cobra.

“The, ah, the early Church took a very practical approach to the problem of getting started in places where other religions were already established. They built their churches right on top of the other religions' temples, and they did the same with their holidays.”

“Yeah?” Jessica said, narrowing her eyes to meet the blond's gaze and picking up a fork from the tray in front of her. She tested it for balance, looking like Jim Bowie's granddaughter. The blond, relegated to the role of the cobra, hissed.

“They scheduled Christmas for the midwinter solstice, the most important festival of the year in the colder countries, when everybody feasted to celebrate having made it through the first half of the winter and started to look forward to surviving the second half.” I leaned forward and removed the fork from her hand. “Easter was slotted at the time of the spring fertility rites, held to ensure good crops and big herds of cattle or sheep or whatever the hell they were herding. Rabbits are symbols of fertility, for what I hope are obvious reasons, because if they're not, I'm not going to explain them.”

“Because they screw like minks,” Jessica said in her piping treble. The blond, who probably hadn't been shocked since Halley's Comet, looked shocked. “And who's the genius who figured out that they lay eggs?” There was an Easter basket, lined with that terrible green cellophane grass, on the table-there was one on every table-and Jessica picked up the top egg in the basket and hefted it, evaluating its potential as a weapon. It had DOTTIE written on it in sparkles.

“Eggs are a fertility symbol too,” I said, hoping she didn't plan to toss it at the blond.

“Well, duh,” Jessica said scornfully. “They're also nice and heavy.”