Cheat and Charmer (60 page)

Time passed, and he was drifting off when he heard sounds in the passageway, faint groans. “Jeez Chrize, pee my panzs.” She was up again! She was going into the bathroom. She would see his pj bottoms on the floor and come looking for him.

He sat up suddenly, waiting to hear what she was doing. The toilet flushed. Water poured out of a faucet. Then there was a terrible thud.

He ran across the living room and into the kitchen, grabbing his foil. The bottle of liquor was still on the counter, and he read the label: Chivas Regal. The bottle was empty, and for an instant he felt triumphant. He was right; she
had
gotten drunk, and he had recognized it.

But now he had to do something. Lorna and Coco were asleep in the alcove; he couldn’t leave them alone. He had to find a way to telephone his mother and father. But how? The telephone was here in the kitchen, but he couldn’t go into the bathroom and get the phone number out of Veevi’s shirt pocket. He was too afraid—afraid that if he tried to call his parents Veevi would hear him and come out of the bathroom and—he wasn’t sure what—do something to him. He didn’t want to go in there, because he was also afraid that she might be lying on the floor—dead—with maybe a lot of blood all over the place. Without thinking further, he opened the kitchen door and stepped barefoot onto the cold garage floor.

Then he ran, foil under his arm, the blade sticking out behind him, flying past the three palm trees on the small patch of clipped front lawn, and onto the coarse new road. Sharp-edged particles of asphalt and sand bit into the soles of his feet as he raced down the middle of the pavement. On his left, he could just make out the silhouettes of houses and palm trees; on his right, the desert was a forbidding expanse of darkness and cold. Snakes and lizards! Lizards and snakes! They were out there in the sand, he thought, and perhaps even closer. What if he stepped on one? Well, it didn’t matter now. He had his foil. He could fight them if he had to. All he knew was that he had to do something to save his sister and his cousin. Running, his chest heaving and aching, he looked for a house whose lights were on.

It was past the neighborhood swimming pool and in front of a house
that was dark except for the dim gray flickers of a television set that he finally stopped. He was gasping, and his mouth felt so dry that he was afraid the words would stick in his throat. He ran up the flagstone path and pressed the doorbell. Two chimes followed, one high, the other low; he was bothered by the absence of a third, which would have made a full chord.

The door opened, and Peter found himself looking at the wary face of a heavy-set woman in a housedress, a scarf over a full set of curlers. Words heaved out of him; he was afraid she would slam the door. “Please, ma’am, I’m staying down the street, in this house, and my aunt’s there. She was baby-sitting for us, but she got drunk and fell down in the bathroom. My mom and dad are at a party—can I please call them from your phone?”

The woman, who was in her early forties, saw a thin pale boy of about ten, with a sweet oval face, dark eyes and dark hair, a heaving chest, panting and hugging himself. He was barefoot. And in his left hand he was holding a thin, gleaming foil.

“You’ve got a sword?”

“It’s a foil, ma’am. I’m a fencer. I brought it to kill lizards and snakes.”

“All right, Errol, come on in,” she said with a faint western twang. “But give me that sword, son. There’s no reptiles in my house, that’s for sure.”

Peter handed her the foil and stepped inside. The woman’s husband was standing next to a television lounger, looking at him curiously.

“Errol Flynn here needs to phone his parents,” she explained. “His aunt’s the baby-sitter and she got drunk and fell down.” She held up the foil. “He’s a fencer.”

“Is this a game?” the man asked, but not harshly. “Are you playing pirates?”

“No, sir. My aunt got drunk and fell down. I want to call my mom and dad.”

“Where is she now, son?” the man asked. “Your aunt.” He, too, had a western accent, and he was wearing, Peter noted, a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and a string tie.

“She fell down in the bathroom,” Peter said.

“Passed out?”

“I
think
so,” Peter said.

“Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know. I need to call my mom and dad.”

“Well, the phone’s here, hon,” the woman said, motioning to the coffee table. “Do you have the number?”

“My parents are at George Joy’s house,” Peter explained. The woman’s eyes opened wide. “I don’t know the number. It’s on a piece of paper my mom gave my aunt, but it’s in her pocket. My mom said it’s ‘unlisted.’ I don’t know what that means. Do you have a phone book?”

The woman disappeared for a moment and came back with a phone book that Peter could see was about a quarter of the size of the Los Angeles phone book at home. “You can look in here,” she said, opening the book. “But if it’s an unlisted number you won’t find it. Did you say George Joy?
The
George Joy?”

“Yeah,” said Peter.

“Your folks know him?”

“Uh-huh.”

Peter explained that his father made movies and that George Joy had been in a lot of them. She asked him to name some of the movies his father had made with George Joy, and when he finished she said, “Son of a gun. I’ve seen them all. What’s your father’s name, Errol? And what’s yours?” He told her. “Son of a gun,” she said again.

“Try Information for him, Velma,” the man said. He had a deep, slow kind of voice. His belly hung over his underslung pants, and Peter noticed that his belt had been loosened and that the button at the top of his trousers was undone.

“I’m just doing that now, Garnett,” said the woman. “Here, hon, you just set down.” She pointed toward the sofa, and Peter obeyed. The woman dialed Information and asked for the number of a Mr. George Joy in Palm Springs. She waited and then scowled slightly. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up. “She says the number’s unlisted and can’t be given out.” She dialed Information again. “Operator, this is an emergency. There’s a child here with a drunken baby-sitter who might be injured. He says his parents are at Mr. George Joy’s. Can’t you give us the number?” She listened and put the phone down again. “She says to give her our number and she’ll call the George Joy residence and then your parents can call you here. Unless you want me to call the police.”

Peter shook his head. He wanted his parents to come.

The woman gave the operator Peter’s name, and then her name—Mrs. Garnett Holman—and the number. Then she and Peter sat on the sofa
while her husband sat in his recliner, and they waited for Jake and Dinah to call back.

His parents had left the party, Mrs. Holman explained to Peter after the operator had called back. They were already on their way home. Mr. Holman said he would go and wait for them at the house; that way, he could see whether the boy’s aunt was injured and call an ambulance if necessary. Peter explained to him that their house was the one down the street with the three palm trees in the front yard. He saw Mr. Holman button his pants and take a pair of high cowboy boots from the coat closet near the door. The man sat down on the sofa and pulled on the boots. He did this slowly and methodically. Then he took out a leather fringed jacket and a ten-gallon hat. Peter wondered whether he had a holster and a gun.

“All right, son. Now, don’t worry,” Mr. Holman said. “I’ll be back here in no time with your folks. Velma, put him to bed in Glendora’s room. All right, I’m going,” he shouted.

“All right, Garnett,” Velma called back. “Be careful, now.”

Within minutes, Peter was settled under the tight sheets of the couple’s daughter’s bed.

The daughter was sixteen and was at a slumber party, Mrs. Holman said. “You try to get some sleep, hon,” she said to him. “I’ll let you know when your mom and dad get here.”

He felt deliciously happy to be in the strange house and the strange bed. Velma. Garnett. Glendora. The man and woman teasing him, calling him Errol. His getting the joke and not minding it. Then their calling him “son.” He liked the names. He liked the man with the string tie and the cowboy boots, who was going to meet his parents. He was proud of himself for going for help, proud for running along the scary street in the middle of the night, proud of himself for noticing what was different and nice about these people. No one could say he was afraid of lizards and snakes now. Even if there had been a thousand of them out there, he told himself, he would still have run for help. That means I’m brave, he said to himself. I’m not a sissy. He wanted his father to know—to know and to stop picking on him all the time about his fear and his fencing, and everything else.

T
he voice, the rustle of chiffon, the perfume, pulled him from the dark burrow where he was no longer conscious, yet at the same time not quite deeply asleep. Opening his eyes, he saw his mother sitting on the bed and felt her taking his hands. When he sat up, she took off the orange chiffon shawl and wrapped it tightly around him. It felt warm and smelled like her. “C’mon, honey, I have the c-c-c-car running outside.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“I’ll tell you in the car, honey. C’mon, sweetie.”

“My foil, Mom.”

“Mrs. Holman’s got it. She’ll give it to you on the way out.”

In the car, she told him that there was an ambulance at the house that was going to take Veevi to the hospital. She had fallen and hit her head; there was some blood on the bathroom floor and she just wanted him to know and not to get upset. He saw the ambulance and its flashing red light in the driveway of the house. He wanted to look inside its open back door, but Dinah steered him through the kitchen, across the living room, and past the bathroom, where, leaning against the doorway, were his father and Mr. Holman. They were watching something that was going on inside the bathroom. He thought he could see two men in uniforms kneeling over something that he couldn’t see but that he knew had to be Veevi.

“Don’t l-l-l-look,” said Dinah, putting her left hand like a visor over his eyes and pushing him gently toward her room. On the way, she took his foil and leaned it against the wall in the living room.

Peter sat on his parents’ rumpled bed. He took off the chiffon shawl
and sat with his arms crossed and his legs dangling over the edge. His mother had gone for a glass of water. The door was closed, but he could hear the sound of men treading back and forth across the living room to the ambulance outside and back to the bathroom again. He felt stranger than he ever had before. Nothing like this would ever have happened at their Delfern house, he reflected. It was all because this house was so small. If Veevi had been baby-sitting at home and had gotten drunk and fallen downstairs in the den, he would never have known it. She could have died or shouted for help, and he would have been too far away in his own room to know it.

He got under the covers and listened, tensely. Then his mother came back. “I had to get some clothes for Veevi.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She peed herself. And she got into bed and peed all over me.”

“She got into b-b-b-bed with you?”

“Yeah. She got in and started making kissing sounds, Mom”—he made a face—“and then she peed the bed.”

“That must have been awful. Here,” she said, “take this.” She took a little bottle of pills out of her vanity case, opened it, and let a capsule roll into her palm; then she took the needle of a safety pin and pricked the capsule’s brilliant orange-and-red skin, so that some of the white powder fell into the ashtray on the bedside table. “I’m giving you half of this,” she said. Then she told him to swallow the pill.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You’ll get sleepy real s-s-s-soon. But tell me what happened.”

He did, lingering on the peeing and kissing part, and on the terrifying thud. “Oh, poor you. Poor Veevi,” his mother said. When he was finished, she said that since the sheets on his bed were probably wet he would have to sleep in Veevi’s bed.

“I don’t want to sleep in her bed,” he said. He didn’t want to be close to anything that smelled of her in any way.

“She won’t be there, honey. You’ve got to go to sleep.”