T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

She opened the door on a nervous-looking young man with a pale cleanshaven expanse of upper lip and a puff of tawny beard clinging like plumage to the very tip of his chin. He was wearing a beige uniform with some sort of piping on the left shoulder and a circular patch over the breast pocket. His eyes — a dull, watery blue — stared out of his head in two different directions and his feet seemed to be working out the steps of some intricate dance routine on the doormat. “Mrs. Gargano?” he said, lifting his eyebrows and tightening the flesh round his mouth so that the flag of his beard seemed to stand at attention.

“Yes?” Grace said, with just the right blend of caution and hospitality — no matter how rude and venal the world might have become, she was always prepared to be gracious. The young man seemed to be looking beyond her at the knickknack shelf and her collection of ceramic figurines, though it was hard to say with those roving eyes. Suddenly she was overcome by a wave of pity — what must his mother have thought when she pressed him to her breast for the first time? — and she saw herself offering him a cup of tea and a slice of the banana nut bread she’d baked for her daughter, Jet.

“I’m Officer Kraybill,” he said, “of Fish and Game? We’ve had a complaint.”

It was then that she saw the curtains stir in the front window of the house across the street — Gladys Tranh’s house — and she had her first intimation of what was coming. “A complaint?”

“Yes,” the young man said, and his eyes had pulled into focus now, both of them locked on her face with a sudden intensity that made her wilt. “We understand you’re harboring wild animals on the premises.”

“Wild—?” For a moment, that was all she could manage to say, but she looked at him again, looked at him harder, and recovered herself. “Well, no. Not at all. There’s just my babies—”

“Babies?”

“My squirrels — my sick ones, the ones in need. People have been bringing them to me for years….”

Officer Kraybill’s jaw sagged and then composed itself again. His eyes were all over the place. He smiled — or tried to. “Mind if I have a look? I mean, if it’s not too much trouble, would you show them to me?”

Everything hung in the balance, but she didn’t know, didn’t suspect — she was too much an innocent, too trusting, too willing to judge a stranger by his poor homely walleyed face. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, but her tone was the tone of a woman who wants to be persuaded, “—I have a beauty parlor appointment at eleven….”

“It wouldn’t take a minute,” he said, coming right back at her. “I’d just like a look, to see what you’re doing — with the sick ones, I mean.”

And that was it, that was what got her: how could she resist anyone who spoke of her sick ones, her poor ailing babies? She opened the door wide and Officer Kraybill, with his misaligned eyes and insinuating beard, was in the house.

He lingered a moment over the ceramic squirrels—“Aren’t they precious?” she said. “They’re from Surrey, England, the ‘Squirrels of the World’ collection?”—and then she invited him into the living room. Misty and Bruno were there, stretched out on the sofa watching a “Lassie” rerun, a show that never failed to excite them. Whenever the collie barked out a message to his master, Bruno would stand up on his hind legs and chitter at the screen while Misty spun cartwheels across the rug. It was quite a sight, cute as pie, but as Grace stepped into the room with Officer Kraybill, both squirrels were lounging on their bellies contemplating a revolutionary new cheese slicer from Sweden. “That’s Misty,” Grace said, “the little Douglas’s? And the gray squirrel is Bruno. They’re inseparable. Like brother and sister.”

“Are they sick?” Officer Kraybill wanted to know.

“Sick?” she echoed, freezing him with a look of astonishment even as the image of the cheese slicer was replaced by that of a collie vaulting a white picket fence. “Why, they wouldn’t last ten minutes if I let them out the door.”

Still playing dumb, still stringing her along, Officer Kraybill lifted his eyebrows and let his wet eyes settle on her. “What’s wrong with them?”

Jet had warned her not to lecture people, but Grace couldn’t help herself, she just couldn’t — this was her life. “Misty’s been with me three years now — or almost three years; let’s see, it’ll be three in April. She was partially eviscerated by a Cadillac in Rancho Park and she’d gone into a coma before she was brought here — for the first week it was touch and go. Dr. Diaz got her patched up, but then we discovered she was diabetic — oh, yes, squirrels contract diabetes, just like people — and she requires two shots of insulin a day. Without it she’d go into shock and die.”

The officer had moved closer to the couch and he was peering down at Misty, his expression noncommittal.

“And Bruno,” she said, rushing on — and so what if Jet thought she put people off, that didn’t matter a whit, not where her babies were concerned—“Bruno’s been with me over six years now. He’s my favorite, except for Phil, of course, and I don’t mind admitting it.” She pinched her voice in a soft crooning falsetto: “Here, Bruno, come on, baby, come on.” Bruno twisted his neck to fasten his black glittering eyes on her and then, though you could see he was racked with pain, he hauled himself up the slope of the couch and made a feeble leap into her arms. “That’s right,” she crooned, bending to peck him a kiss.

Officer Kraybill cleared his throat.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to get carried away — it’s just that they’re so lovable, they are…. Well Bruno, Bruno suffers from arthritis and lumbago, and when he first came to me — here, you can see it here, along the base of his spine? — he’d lost the better part of his tail in an accident involving a Weber charcoal grill. And while that may not sound like much to you, you have to understand what something like that will do to a squirrel’s self-respect. I mean, his tail is everything — his blanket and pillow, his napkin, his new suit of clothes — and he flags every female in the forest with it. Bruno was devastated. Mr. Kraybill, you never saw such a depressed squirrel.”

But Officer Kraybill didn’t seem to be focusing on Bruno. He was scribbling something in a little leatherbound notebook. “And how many others do you have?” he asked, his voice flat and mechanical.

“You’re taking notes?” she said, and for the first time the gravity of the situation began to dawn on her.

“Just a formality,” he told her, but his wild eye betrayed him. “We’ve had a complaint. I’ve got to check it out. Now, how many do you have in all?”

“Thirty-two,” Grace said, tight-lipped. She cradled Bruno in her arms, afraid suddenly. “But why do you need to know? What sort of complaint was it?” She tried out a nervous laugh. “You don’t — I mean, I’m not doing anything wrong, am I?”

“And where do you keep them?” he said, ignoring the question. “Besides these two?”

Grace tried to compose herself. There’d been a complaint, that was all, nothing to get excited about. “I’ve got cages in the garage — but at any given time of the day, the squirrels have the run of the house. They’re litter-trained, you know, each and every one of them, even the pair that just came to me last week. Don’t think I keep them cooped up — I’d never do that. And I clean the cages daily, without fail—”

“I’d like to see the cages.” He was facing her, pen poised over the notebook, and he was no longer asking.

There was a silence. From the TV came the sound of a dog barking and Grace prayed that Misty and Bruno wouldn’t go into their routine — it just wouldn’t be appropriate right now, even she could see that. She thought for just a second of asking if he had a search warrant, like they do on the police shows, but that wouldn’t be courteous, and instead she heard herself saying, “Yes, of course.”