T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

It was then that the door from the garage pushed open ever so slightly and Phil crawled in. There he was, tacked to the rug and looking up inquisitively at the visitor, not a trace of fear in him, while the sounds of the others — a contented mid-morning chatter — drifted through the doorway. And the smell. The smell too. Grace felt she had to offer an explanation. “Don’t mind that musty odor,” she said, “that’s natural. I could scrub the cages and change the wood shavings a hundred times a day and it’d still be there — think of it as their natural perfume. And this”—indicating the big yellow and chocolate Douglas’s squirrel at their feet—“this is Phil.”

“And he’s sick too, right?”

She gave the man a look. Was he trying to be rude? Her voice turned cold. “Phil was mauled by a pit bull. He required sixty-seven stitches to close his wounds and he will never have the use of his rear legs again. I’ll have you know, what with his various ailments, that I’ve taken him to Dr. Diaz over seventy times in the past two years.”

But Officer Kraybill wasn’t interested in Phil’s problems. He stepped over him and strode into the garage, where all the caged squirrels set up an expectant chittering. Molly went up and down the mesh of her cage like a monkey — she thought it was treat time — and Rudolfo sat up and clicked his teeth like a pair of castanets. In the time it took Grace to scoop Phil from the floor and step into the garage, a squirrel under each arm, Officer Kraybill had made up his mind. “You are in illegal possession of wildlife,” he announced, turning to her, “and unless these creatures are released back into the wild, we will have to confiscate them.”

Grace was stunned. “Confiscate? But they need me, can’t you see that? They’d die if I set them loose.”

“These squirrels — and all wildlife — are the property of the State of California, and it is against the law to keep, traffic in or domesticate them.”

Grace felt her heart stop, just like that, as if she was stretched out on the operating table, as if her pacemaker had gone dead in her chest. And then she caught her breath and her heart started up again and she was fierce with the sudden hammering of it. They weren’t going to take her babies away, no one was. Never. She came right back at him and she felt no obligation to be polite now that he’d shown his colors. “But I can kill them, though, can’t I? I can stalk them with a gun, innocent things that wouldn’t hurt a fly, isn’t that right?”

The eyes were back in their orbits. The beard stabbed at her. “If you have a valid hunting license, in season; there’s no bag limit on ground squirrels.”

“That’s crazy.”

He shrugged.

“But they’re people,” Grace said, and she could hear the break in her own voice, “little fur people.”

When the phone rang, Jet was coloring her hair. She was only twenty-eight, but she’d had gray in her hair since she was in her teens, and now she had to touch up her roots every other week if she didn’t want to look like the Bride of Frankenstein. It didn’t really bother her — haircolor was one of the grim necessities of life, like lipstick, eyeliner and makeup — but lately she’d begun to notice some gray down below — or white, actually, coiled white hairs of amazing length — and that really upset her. She’d spent nearly an hour the other night with the tweezers and a mirror, her legs propped up against the bathtub, the whole thing feeling vaguely obscene and not a little ridiculous, but she kept wondering what Vincent would think if he saw her turning white before his eyes. They’d only been dating a month, but he was two years younger than her and she’d told him she was twenty-five. Gray hairs. Little folds under her eyes. Some sort of scale on the back of her hands. And now she had the black paste all over her scalp, wondering if she should try it down there too — not this time, but maybe next — and the phone started ringing. She wriggled out of the plastic gloves and held the receiver gingerly to her wet ear.

Her mother’s voice was there suddenly, gasping out her name over the wire, and it was the gasp of a drowning woman, a woman asphyxiating on her own sobs. “My babies! They want to take my babies!”

When Jet got to the house, her hair still damp and black now with the sheer glistening chemical glow of the dye that would take two or three good shampooings to mellow into something that could pass for natural, she found the front door locked. “Ma,” she called, “you in there?” and she was about to go round back when a movement across the street caught her attention. It was her mother, dressed in an oversize green sweater that hid the flare of her hips, and she was rattling the wrought-iron gate out front of Mrs. Tranh’s house. This struck Jet as odd on a number of counts, not the least of which was that her mother and Mrs. Tranh had never been particularly friendly — or even neighborly, for that matter. But then nothing her mother did lately would have surprised Jet. People called Grace eccentric, but to Jet’s mind the term didn’t begin to describe the gulf of abstraction her mother seemed to be floundering in. That was what it meant to get old and have your husband die and your heart go bad. Eccentricity. It was like gray hairs.

Jet crossed the street, watching her mother’s shoulders as Grace fumbled with the latch, bewildered by the simple mechanism. Maybe it was one of the squirrels, Jet was thinking, maybe that was it. One of them escaped or something and she was canvassing the neighborhood. From the sound of her voice on the phone you would have thought they’d dropped a bomb on the house or something.

“Gladys!” Grace cried out suddenly in a high, oddly fluty voice, as if she were locked in an echo chamber. “Gladys Tranh! You open this gate!” A car that was badly in need of a muffler sputtered up the street. The starlings nesting in the twin palms out front of the Tranh house began to squabble and a few shot out from beneath the protection of the fronds as if they’d been expelled. “Gladys! I want to talk to you!”

Mrs. Tranh had cautiously cracked open her front door and extruded the nearly bald bulb of her head by the time Jet had reached her mother. Mrs. Tranh had a tight smile frozen on her face. She was so old she’d begun to look like a Chihuahua, and when was the last time Jet had seen her? “Go ‘way,” she said.

“Ma?” Jet reached out to touch her mother’s arm. “Ma, what’s wrong — is it the squirrels?”

Her mother turned to fix her with a tragic look and Jet felt something tighten inside her. “Jet,” was all her mother could say, and she forced out the single syllable of her only daughter’s name as if with her expiring breath. There were tears in her eyes. Her hands shook as they tried to make sense of the latch. But then she swung back round on Mrs. Tranh, who was gazing defiantly at her from across the expanse of the front walk, and lifted her voice: “You made that complaint, didn’t you? I know it was you. You just can’t stand to see anybody doing any good in this world, can you?”

“Ma,” Jet said, taking hold of her mother’s arm, but Grace shook her off.

“They want to take my babies!” she cried suddenly, and half a dozen starlings flew shrieking from the palms.

Mrs. Tranh’s eyes glittered, two fragments of volcanic glass buried in the worn hide of her face. “They stink, your baby,” Mrs. Tranh said in a gritty, dried-out voice. “Dirty animal.”

Jet had begun to feel conspicuous. At least two cars had passed and slowed as if this were some sort of spectacle, a sideshow, and a woman three doors down — was that Mrs. Mahon? — had stepped out onto her porch. Jet’s scalp tingled under the lingering assault of the chemical, and she looked away for a moment, distracted. That was when her mother threw one sneaker-clad foot atop the spikes of the wrought-iron fence and attempted to boost herself over, muttering under her breath. “Ma,” Jet snapped, and she couldn’t help herself, everyone was looking, “have you gone crazy or what? Come down off there, come on,” and she was tugging at her mother’s sweater and fighting the rigid pole of her mother’s leg when Violet Tranh appeared in the doorway behind her own mother. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. And then: “Jet? Mrs. Gargano?”