T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

At this point, Jet had succeeded in extricating her mother’s foot from the spikes of the railing, but perversely Grace had seized two of the palings and refused to let go. “Damn it, Ma, what’s wrong?” Jet hissed as Violet Tranh came down the walk and stationed herself on the far side of the gate, an expression that might be interpreted as satiric pressed into the smooth flesh at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Violet was the youngest of the Tranhs and she and Jet had gone to high school together. Jet was thinking about that as the faces seemed to multiply up and down the block and the cars slowed and Violet smirked. They’d both had a crush on the same guy once — Derek Kubota — and Violet was the one he’d finally asked out.

“What’s the problem?” Violet said.

“It’s nothing,” Jet assured her. “My mom’s just a little upset, is all.” Jet wanted to sink right on down through the sidewalk and become one with the grubs, beetles and worms.

“I’m not upset,” Grace insisted, turning a furious face on her. “It’s your mother,” she said, coming back to Violet. “She”—and here her voice broke again—“she put in a complaint about my, my babies.”

Mrs. Tranh spoke up then, her voice leaping and pitching through a morass of Vietnamese that sounded like the recipe for a six-course meal. Violet looked straight into Jet’s eyes as she translated. “My mother says this is a residential neighborhood, zoned for houses, not animals.”

“Animals?” Jet echoed, and though she knew the whole thing was ridiculous, she could feel the anger rising in her. “We’re talking squirrels here, aren’t we? Are we on the same page or what? Look up in the trees, why don’t you? — the squirrels were here before we were.”

Violet never took her eyes off her. It was like a staring contest, a stripping away of the flesh to probe at the vitals beneath. “Yeah,” she said, and her voice had a real edge to it, “and so were the dinosaurs.”

Grace knew what was coming. She knew the Officer Kraybills of the world didn’t care a fig about mercy or tenderness or what was right and good — no, all they cared about was the law, the stupid law that allowed you to blast your fellow creatures out of the trees but made you into a criminal if you dared to try and ease their suffering. And they would be back, she was sure of that.

All that week she was up before dawn, up and dressed, brooding over her coffee while her babies played at her feet. She’d released Florio (as if that would satisfy them) because he didn’t need her care anymore — Dr. Diaz had removed the splint and pronounced him fit. The only thing was, Florio refused to go. Every time she looked up, there he was, staring in at the window, and it didn’t matter what part of the house she went to — living room, basement, kitchen, bedroom — there he was, cluttering at the glass. Finally, last night, when the temperature dipped down into the thirties, she’d broken down and let him back in. He was under the table now, wrestling with Rudolfo. They’d become best friends, nothing short of that, and how could she justify separating them?

Still, she was no fool, and she knew they’d be back — Officer Kraybill and probably some other officious puff-bearded servant of the law — to badger and bully her into giving up her babies. They’d have a subpoena or search warrant or something and they’d tramp through her house like the Gestapo, hauling away her sick ones even as she barred the door with her body. The image appealed to her — barring the door with her body — and she was holding it there in the steam that rose from her second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang and all her worst fears were realized.

It was Officer Kraybill — she recognized him through the receding lens of the peephole in the front door — and he had two others with him, a man and a woman dressed in uniforms identical to his. Three of them, and she couldn’t help thinking that was the way it always was in the movies and on TV when they had to evict widows or tear children from their mothers’ breasts, safety in numbers, don’t get your hands dirty. But oh, boy, her heart was going. She crouched there behind the door and she didn’t know what to do. The bell rang again and then again. She heard them conferring in a blur of voices and then a shadow flitted past the curtains in the living room and she heard the doorknob rattle in the kitchen. She was one step ahead of them: it was locked, locked and bolted.

“Mrs. Gargano? Are you in there?”

It was his voice, Officer Kraybill’s, and she could picture his fish eyes going crazy in his head. She held her breath, crouched lower. And that might have been the end of it, at least for then, but just at that moment Misty came shooting across the rug with Florio on her heels and the two of them made a leap for the clothestree and the clothestree slammed into the wall with a thump you could have heard all the way to Sherman Oaks and back.

“Mrs. Gargano? I can hear you in there. Now will you open up or do I have to use force? It’s in our power, you know — you are harboring wild animals in there and as agents of the Fish and Game Department we have the right of search and seizure. Do you hear me? Mrs. Gargano?”

She had to speak up then, because she was afraid and because the germ of an idea had begun to take hold in her brain. “I’m, I’m not feeling well,” she called, trying to distort her clear natural soprano into something feeble and stricken.

There was a moment’s silence. The rumble of voices: more conferring. Then a new voice, a woman’s: “This is Officer Soto, Mrs. Gargano. We’re very sorry to hear that you’re ill, but you stand in violation of the law and this is no small matter. If you refuse to cooperate we’ll have no recourse but to obtain a warrant, do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she bleated, putting everything she had into the subterfuge of her voice. “I don’t want any trouble — I just want the best for my … my babies. But I’m not dressed yet, I’m not, really. If you come back later I’ll let you in—”

Officer Kraybill: “Promise?”

She’d never let them in. She’d die first. Set the house afire and take her babies with her. “Yes,” she called. “I promise.”

Another silence. Then the voices, consulting. “All right,” Officer Soto said finally, “you’ve got twenty-four hours. We’ll be back here tomorrow morning at eight A.M. sharp, and there’ll be no more of this business, do you hear? We’ll have a warrant with us.”

Grace watched them leave through a crack in the curtains. There was a cockiness to their gait that irritated her — even the woman walked like a football player. She watched them climb into the cab of a truck big enough to take away all her babies at once and haul them off to some Fish and Game compound, some concentration camp somewhere. It made her heart pound even to think about it.

But she wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot. This wasn’t Nazi Germany, this was America, and if they thought they were going to just walk in and trample all over her rights, they had another think coming. Before they’d turned the corner, Grace had Jet on the phone.

Jet didn’t know the first thing about U-Haul trucks and she was afraid to drive anything that big anyway, so she called up Vincent at work — he was bartending till closing — and asked him if he’d meet her at her place when he got off. She’d managed to get the thing as far as her apartment, but that was only six blocks from the. rental office, in light traffic and with no turns or stoplights — getting it all the way over to her mother’s was something else altogether. Vincent didn’t sound too happy about the whole proposition — she wasn’t exactly overjoyed herself — but there it was.