They wanted to take her babies away. Wanted to seize them by court order and deny her access to them as if she were some welfare mother smoking crack in the ghetto, as if she couldn’t nurse and doctor them herself though she’d been doing it all these years and when had there ever been a complaint? Even the rumor of a complaint? She was furious, but she was scared too, scared in a way that tugged at her bowels and made the roots of her hair ache as if she’d been suspended by her ponytail in some hellish high-wire act. Even her babies couldn’t comfort her, not at first, not after the door slammed behind the officer and all the gloom of the uncaring world rushed in to fill the house with the dismal fog of defeat.
And the day had begun so promisingly—that’s what made it all the worse. After two days of overcast, Grace had woken to a kitchen suffused with a sun so ripe and mellow it was as if she were standing inside an orange and looking out, and she just knew that Rudolfo would take his medication without a fuss and that Birgitta’s temperature would have come down during the night. And she was right, she was right! Even Phil seemed better, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at breakfast and nodding his cunning little head in time to the music on the radio as she cleaned up the dishes. And then the UPS man came—and that was a blessing too, because the copy of Sciuridae in History she’d ordered from a mail-order house in Connecticut had finally arrived, and she was just sitting down to leaf through it, already fascinated by the pictures of mummified squirrels dug out of the ruins at Pompeii, when the bell rang again.
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.”
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?”
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.
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.”
That was all Grace needed to hear. “No, no police!” she sobbed.
Mrs. Tranh perked up suddenly. “Your squirrel baby,” she said, “that’s what this is about, yes?” The flashing lights played off her face, shot sparks from her eyes. “In Bien-hoa we eat squirrel. Monkey too.” She was looking at Jet now, her mouth twisted tight with the effort of the words. “Tell your mother save people, not squirrel.”
Grace said something then that Jet would never believe had come from the lips of her mother, and she had to hold her back, the older woman’s arms straining against her as when their roles were reversed and Jet was the child. That was when her mother turned on her with a hiss: “One simple thing I ask from you, one simple thing, and look what happens—”
It was a mess, a real mess. Mrs. Tranh wouldn’t let Vincent pull the truck away from the car until the police came and wrote up their report, and though there wasn’t much traffic, Jet had to stand out in the middle of the street, shivering in her hooded sweatshirt, and wave the cars by with a flashlight. Her mother wanted to unload the squirrels and hide them back in the garage before the police came, but Jet talked her out of it, and finally Grace staggered across the street like a woman twice her age and hid herself in the darkened house.
After a while it began to rain, a soft breathing mist of a rain that took the curl out of Jet’s hair but didn’t seem to discourage the Tranhs, who sat grimly at the curb waiting for the law to arrive. It must have been nearly half past one when the police finally showed up, two gray-haired men in their forties, one Mexican, one white. They were half-asleep, rolling out of the car like the jelly doughnuts that sustained them, until Mrs. Tranh woke them up. “All right,” the white cop said in the chop of the lights and the swirl of mist that hung round him like a curtain, “who was driving here?”
The Tranhs looked to Jet and Jet looked to Vincent. It seemed to her he had a pleading sort of look in his eyes, the sort of look that was meant to convey a complex message about love and commitment, about guilt and responsibility and maybe even lapsed insurance payments. “He was,” she said finally, and she couldn’t help lifting her finger to point him out.
Grace never drank, not more than once or twice a year anyway, but as she sat in the darkened house and watched the lights clench and unclench the belly of the curtains while the Tranhs and her daughter and Vincent and half a dozen or so of the curious or bored moved back and forth in silhouette across the scene of the accident, she groped in the liquor cabinet for one of Bill’s bottles of liquor—any one—screwed off the cap and took a swallow. It was like drinking acid. Instantly her stomach was on fire and she wanted to spit the stuff back into the bottle, but it was too late. After a minute, though, she took another sip, and then another, and before long her heart stopped hammering at her rib cage. She had to be careful. She did. She could have another episode and that was the last thing she wanted—that wouldn’t do her babies any good, no, no good at all.
She peeked through the curtains, waiting now, waiting for the police to ask what was in the truck, as if they couldn’t hear—and smell—for themselves. And if they didn’t ask, Gladys Tranh would tell them, you could count on that. “Squirrels?” the policeman would say, and then: “Do you have a permit for these animals?” And if that happened it was just a matter of time before Officer Kray-bill showed up to have the last laugh. But maybe she should go out there, maybe she could distract them—or maybe, if she pleaded and begged and threatened to kill herself, they’d at least let her have Phil; Phil, that’s all she wanted—
But nothing happened. The rain fell. The odd car drove round the truck. Gladys Tranh went back into the house and one of the policemen wrote out his report while Jet, Vincent and Violet looked on. Then the police were gone and the Tranh house was dark and Jet was knocking at the door. “Ma? Are you in there?” Jet called. “Listen, Ma, is it okay if we call it off for tonight? Vincent’s tired. Ma? He says he doesn’t want to do it.”
Grace just stood there, the door between her and her daughter, the pacemaker keeping its rock-steady beat in her chest, and she didn’t say a word.
(1994)