T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

It was past eleven when he came up the walk to her apartment — business had been slow and he’d closed up early — and she was out the door in a hooded sweatshirt before he could ring the bell. She fell into his arms and groped at him a bit while they kissed, and then she held up the keys to the truck. Vincent was tall and bone-thin, with a high-stacked pompadour and long sideburns and a fading green tattoo on the left side of his neck. The tattoo was homemade and it was so old and shapeless you couldn’t really tell what it was — Vincent said he’d done it with a couple of friends one night when he was fifteen or sixteen, he couldn’t remember exactly. “And what’s it supposed to be?” she’d asked him when they first met. He’d shrugged. “It didn’t really come out,” he said. “Yeah,” she said. “And so?” He shrugged again. “It’s supposed to be Donatello — you know, the Ninja Turtles?”

Tonight, he just climbed into the truck, shaking his head. “Nobody would believe me if I told them what we were doing here,” he said, “—I mean, safehouses for squirrels? Or maybe we should call them safeholes or something.” The truck started up then with a rumbling clatter, as if there were nothing under the hood but iron filings and cheap aluminum fans. Vincent jerked at the gearshift, and the lights of a passing car isolated his look of bemusement, a look Jet found irresistible. They kissed again, a long lingering kiss, and she assured him he’d have his reward — later.

Grace blinked the porchlight twice when they pulled up in front of the house, then all the lights went out. A moment later she joined them in the driveway, a tiny figure dressed all in black. “Shh,” she warned as they stepped down from the truck, “they could be watching — you never know.”

Vincent hunched his shoulders in his leather jacket and lit a cigarette. Jet had brought him to the house to meet her mother two weeks ago, and after making him what she called a highball with some of the V.S.O.P. bourbon she’d inherited from Jet’s father, Grace had taken him out to the garage and introduced him to each and every one of her thirty-odd squirrels — and of course there was a story behind each of them, a long and detailed story. Vincent had taken it pretty well — at least nothing showed on his face as far as Jet could see — but now he said, “Who? Who’d be watching at this hour?”

“Shhhh!” Grace clamped a hand round Vincent’s arm and pressed a finger to her lips. “You don’t want to know,” she whispered, and then they were following her into the garage, where the squirrels greeted them with a vigorous whirring of their exercise wheels and the usual rising odor of dank fermentation that Jet could only liken to the smell of the shower room in high school.

They worked by the ghostly glimmer of two nightlights, all the illumination her mother would risk, and as Jet and Vincent hauled the big awkward wire cages out the door and stacked them in the back of the truck, Grace hovered at their elbows, urging them to be extra careful with this one and to set that one down easy and not to disturb Molly or Lucretius or whoever. The last three cages contained her favorites, the squirrels that seemed to mean more to her than Jet or her father or anyone ever had — Phil, Misty and Bruno. These were the ones she gave the run of the house to and they were destined for Jet’s apartment, an arrangement that Jet had decidedly mixed feelings about, even though her mother assured her that it would only be for a week or so and that she’d be there every day to look after them herself. “Careful! Careful!” Grace cried as they bob-bled the last cage, their fingers numb with the cold and the impress of the wire. “Oh, Philly, you poor baby, mamakins is going to look after you, yes she is—”

When they’d loaded him in and shut the door, Grace broke down. “Ma,” Jet pleaded, but her mother began to sob and she had to wrap her arms round her and rock her back and forth while Vincent lit an impatient cigarette and fiddled with the collar of his jacket.

“Did you know that Phil is nearly twelve years old, Vincent — did you know that?” Grace said, struggling for control. She was rocking in Jet’s arms, the light of the streetlamp making a glistening doughy ball of her face. “That’s what Dr. Diaz estimates, anyway — and that’s ancient for a squirrel, almost like Methuselah, though they can live to be fifteen, so they say—” And then she did the unforgivable, her mind gone loose with age and anxiety or whatever, but she somehow made the connection between the squirrel’s birthday and Jet’s and before Jet could stop her she said, “But haven’t you got a birthday coming up?”

“We’ve got to be going, Ma,” Jet said. “We’ve got to deliver your, your”—she couldn’t bring herself to use the term “babies,” not in front of Vincent—“these squirrels to six different addresses, one of them all the way out in Simi Valley.”

But her mother wouldn’t quit. “You do have a birthday coming up, don’t you? December fifth. God,” she went on, “I can hardly believe you’re going to be twenty-nine — or is it thirty?”

“Ma—” Jet said.

Vincent said nothing, but Jet could feel him looking at her.

The sound of a car engine half a block away inserted itself into the silence. Overhead, a jet scrawled its graffiti in the sky. Grace sighed. “We’re none of us getting any younger, I guess.”

Vincent climbed back into the truck and Jet gave her mother a hug and told her not to worry, they’d take care of everything. And that would have been that, but for the fact that when Vincent swung wide out of the driveway he let the wheel slip out of his hands for an instant and the right front bumper of the truck cut a long screeching furrow into the side of Mrs. Tranh’s brand-new white Honda Accord, which was pulled up at the curb in front of her house. Instantly, the porchlight at the Tranhs’ went on and Mrs. Tranh and Violet stood there at the door, their necks craning into the light. It was amazing. You would have thought they’d been sleeping on the doormat or something. But that was nothing compared to Grace’s reaction. She let out with a long withering cry of despair that would have waked the dead, and the squirrels, jostled in their cages, responded with such a cacophony of yips, squeals and screeches you would have thought they’d been set afire — and in that moment Jet couldn’t help wishing they had.

The truck was stalled in the middle of the street, emergency lights flashing, the incontrovertible evidence of Vincent’s miscalculation planted in the side of the Accord. Jet’s mother emitted a series of short piping screeches as she skittered across the road and began to claw at the rear door of the truck, which only provoked the squirrels all the more. By this time Vincent was standing on the pavement in the glare of the headlights, scratching his head and puzzling over the rent Accord as if it had dropped down from outer space, and the Tranhs, mother and daughter, were right there too, their voices clamoring in excitement and outrage. Jet climbed down out of the truck and attempted to calm her mother. “Ma,” she said, “Ma, the squirrels are all right, it’s nothing, just a fender bender, that’s all—”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Tranh overheard this last and cried, “Fender bender, that all, huh? Nothing to you, huh? Huh?” She was dressed in a faded pink housecoat and her voice was high and unholy in the night. “I pay good money!” she screeched. And there was Violet, in shorts and bare feet, with a black leather jacket hastily thrown over a little black top, trying to calm her mother too. A long moment ticked by, the timpanic thump of the squirrels throwing themselves against the mesh of their cages punctuating Grace’s sobs, Vincent’s protestations of innocence and Mrs. Tranh’s angry outbursts, and then Violet leveled a look on Jet and said, “We’ll need to see your insurance and we’re going to have to call the police.”