Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

Birdie had a great many Philippine shirts, all of them smaller than the rag I use to polish Alice once a year, and more shoes than a millipede. There were also some antique Japanese kimonos. His clothes hung in color-coordinated glory, like customized color bars on some tailor's television screen. I was reluctant to disturb anything, which was why it took me so long to push the clothing aside and find the door on the other side of the closet. The outside of the door, the side facing me, was extravagantly bolted and barred, but all the bolts and bars were open.

I reached for the doorknob. Behind me, Woofers whimpered.

The door opened inward, away from me, revealing a dim and narrow flight of stairs. They led down. I reached inside and found a light switch.

It was very cool, almost cold, going down. The stairs were oddly proportioned, narrow and awkwardly deep, with a curve to the left. The walls were unpainted plaster, slightly damp to the touch. When I rounded the curve, I saw a small door that might have been taken from a submarine. It was rounded and seemed to be made of iron, and it had a tiny window in it. A sliding metal bar, sufficient to lock it from outside, was pushed to one side.

From some rarely visited corner of my memory an image floated up. Something from first grade, something that brought back a sense of pressure on my knees and something hard over my head, a memory that was full of fear and also a kind of excitement. I reached for the iron door and pulled it open, and as it creaked on its hinges I remembered that the thing under my knees was the floor and the thing above my head was a school desk, and the memory was the vestige of a “drop” drill. What I was entering was a bomb shelter.

You still find them here and there in California, underground temples to the nuclear paranoia of the fifties. Absolutely secure, absolutely soundproof. And even before I found the light switch and looked at the blank white walls, I knew where I was. I was in obedience school.

The room was little, as it would have to have been: its whitewashed walls were concrete, at least four feet thick, and it had been built inside what had originally been a not-very-large basement. The floor was a cold concrete slab. The temperature couldn't have been more than fifty. It was colder than the morgue.

Woofers let out a questioning whine above me. “Come on,” I said, suddenly wanting company. After a moment I heard her nails on the stairs.

The room was close to empty. There was a long cheap Formica table against one wall, entirely bare. Each of its four metal legs stood in the center of one-half of a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs circling the table legs were snapped shut but the other cuff in each pair was open. The table was certainly the podium on which Birdie held his graduation ceremonies. Near the opposite wall stood a Polaroid Spectra System camera on an expensive tripod. Aside from the table there was no furniture.

Set into the wall next to the door were three sets of recessed shelves, probably originally intended to hold canned goods and bottled water but now stacked with cardboard cartons full of odds and ends. One of them held Christmas decorations, little lights to make Birdie's house twinkle, and wrapping paper and ribbons. There were also old athletic shoes, garden supplies, extra detergent, and other homely junk that Birdie had stowed down here now that most people acknowledged that the threat of atomic attack was less pressing than the need to wrap presents, wash dishes, and prune roses.

There were also two doors.

The first led to a closet, no more than four feet by four feet. There were no shelves in it; it was just a tiny room. The door had the same kind of metal bar across its outside, and a small grate had been positioned just above the floor, probably to let in air. A perfect place to lock people in the dark. The children had usually been naked, Marco had said. Naked and freezing in a lightless, comfortless concrete room.

The second door opened into a small bathroom with the kind of awkward plastic toilet they put on boats, and a tiled shower. This was where Aimee had hit high C for the tape recorder while scalding water flowed over her body.

I reclosed the bathroom door and the door to the closet and took a long last look at the room, trying to remember whether I'd moved or changed anything else. Woofers, who had been trembling slightly and keeping very close to me, sat on my right foot. She looked up at me anxiously, ready to go back upstairs.

As I leaned down to pick her up, she got off my foot and stood on her hind legs, doing an eager little dance. She was absurdly light. I wrapped an arm around her and she licked my chin as I headed toward the door.

On impulse, I reached out as I passed the Polaroid and pushed the shutter button. A flash bounced off the white walls and as I strained to get my iris open again the camera went nnnnzzzet and a picture slid out of it. A negative image of my retina slid across the picture's surface as I waited for it to develop, and Woofers squirmed in my arms. Thirty seconds later I was looking at an absolutely white Polaroid except for a hard brown edge running along the bottom of the photo: the white was the wall, and the brown edge was the top of the Formica table.

I stopped worrying about Birdie coming home. The boxes on the shelves beckoned to me, and I put the dog down and rifled through them. Christmas lights, Christmas wrappings, Christmas paper; an old set of silver-backed hairbrushes, odds and ends, decorator trinkets that had outlived their appeal on the tabletops upstairs, a wooden box about eight inches square, with an inlaid lid. Inside the wooden box, cigars. The bows on Woofers' ears came loose with a single tug on each and dangled forlornly on either side of her face. I found a bright preglued red wrapping bow that clashed nicely with the ribbons on her ears, peeled off the backing, and pressed the square of adhesive onto her nose. It held. The transformation was amazing. In a few seconds she'd gone from being Molly Ringwald in PrettyinPink to Bette Davis in WhateverHappenedtoBabyJane ? She had the grace to look embarrassed.

When I mussed up her hair, she seemed to enjoy it. She took a couple of passes at the bow on her nose with her front paws, but stopped when I said, “No, Woofers.” By then I was looking at the Polaroid camera. It had everything I wanted, which is to say two more pictures and a time-release button.

I put Woofers on the table, told her to stay, and positioned the lever on the time release. Then I took a cigar out of Birdie's box, pushed the shutter, and went to the table. I patted Woofers on the head as the time release whirred away, lifted her front paws, turned my head away, and pushed the unlit cigar into the middle of her belly. “Coochy-coo,” I said. She was wagging her tail, enjoying the game, when the flash went off.

It hadn't been necessary to turn my head because I was cut off at the shoulders. The image was perfect, a bedraggled, drunk-looking little dog with a big cigar pointed squarely at her lower intestine. I put everything back the way it was, tucked Woofers into my jacket, and left.

Bertram Skinker was going to sweat.

“She's so cute ,” Jessica trilled. “Where did you get her?” Morris stood in the doorway behind her, slightly spectral in the daylight. I'd never seen him before without a green glow on his face. He seemed to have brought some of it with him. Jessica or someone had gotten him to wear a shirt with only one pocket for a change, but the one pocket bristled with esoteric writing implements. He held a big white book tucked under his sharp elbow. From where I sat, on the floor playing with Woofers, it looked like an upscale Yellow Pages-the one-hundred-percent-white pages, perhaps, designed for neighborhoods where no one who was yellow-or brown or black, for that matter-lived.