Expiration Date (11 page)

A
T THE
intersection ahead of him a man in an old denim jacket was standing on the sidewalk with a dog beside him. The dog was some kind of black German-shepherd mix, and the man was holding a white cardboard sign. When Kootie limped up beside them the dog began wagging its tail, and Kootie stooped to catch his breath and pat the dog on the head.

“Bueno perro”
, Kootie told the man. He could now see that the hand-lettered sign read, in big black letters,
WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET.

“Sí”
, the man said. “Uh…
cómo se dice…perro
is dog, right?”

“Right,” Kootie said. “Nice dog. You speak English.”

“Yeah. You got no accent.”

“I’m Indian, not Mexican. India Indian. Anyway, I was born here.”

The man he was talking to could have been of any race at all, almost of any age at all. His short-cropped white hair was as curly as Kootie’s, and his skin was dark enough so that he might be Mexican or Indian or black or even just very tanned. His lean face was deeply lined around the mouth and the vaguely Asian eyes, but Kootie couldn’t tell if that was a result of age or just exposure to lots of weather.

“Where do you two live?” Kootie found himself asking.

“Nowhere, Jacko,” the man said absently, watching the traffic over Kootie’s head. “Why, where do you live?”

Kootie patted the dog’s head again and blinked back tears of exhaustion, glad of the sunglasses. “Same place.”

The man looked down again and focused on Kootie. “Really?
Here?
”

Kootie blinked up at him and tried to understand the question. “If it was
here
, how could it be nowhere?”

“Hah. You’d be surprised. Act cool, now, okay?”

The light had turned red, and a big battered blue Suburban truck had stopped at the crosswalk lines. The driver leaned across the seat and cranked down the passenger-side window. “Nice dog,” he said through a ragged mustache. “How you all doing?”

“Not so good,” said the white-haired man standing beside Kootie. “My son and I and the dog been standing out here all day waitin’ for someone who needs some kind of work done and we’d like to be able to stay in a motel, tomorrow being Sunday and us wantin’ to get a shower before church, you know? We’re just six bucks short right now.”

Kootie rolled his eyes anxiously behind the sunglasses. Tomorrow was Wednesday, not Sunday.

“Shit,” said the driver. Then, just as the light turned green, he tossed a balled-up bill out the window. “Make it count!” he yelled as he gunned away across the intersection.

The white-haired man had caught the bill and uncrumpled it—it was a five. He grinned down at Kootie, exposing uneven yellow teeth. “Good job. So whatta you, a runaway?”

Kootie glanced nervously back up the street to the west. “My parents are dead.”

“Some kind of foster home? Go back to wherever it is, Jacko.”

“There isn’t any place at all.”

“There isn’t, huh?” The man was watching traffic, but he glanced down at Kootie. “Well there
was
a place, I believe, a day or two ago. That’s a Stussy shirt, and those Reeboks are new. Where were you plannin’ to sleep? Any old where? You get fucked up bad around here, Jacko, trust me. Whole streets of chickenhawks looking for your sort. Nastiness, know what I mean?” He squinted around, then sighed. “You wanna move in with Fred and me for a couple of days?”

Kootie understood that Fred was the dog, and that helped; still he said quickly, “I don’t have any money at all.”

“Bullshit you don’t, you got two bucks just in the last couple of seconds. Fred takes twenty percent, okay? Let’s work this corner for another ten minutes, and then we can move up to Silver Lake.”

Kootie tried to figure where Silver Lake was from here. “That’s a long walk, isn’t it?”

“Fuck walk, and in fact fuck talk, we got a red light coming up again here. I got a car, and Fred and I keep moving. Trust me, you be doin' yourself a favor to ride along with us.”

Kootie looked desperately at the dog’s wide grin and brown eyes, and he thought about
keep moving
, and then he blurted, “Okay.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Kootie.”

The man clasped Kootie’s hand in his own dry, callused palm. “
Kootie?
No kidding. I’m Rightful Glory Mayo. Known as Raffle.” Then, more loudly, he said, “Can we wash your car windows, ma’am? My boy and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

Raffle didn’t even have a squirt bottle or a newspaper to wash windows with, but the woman in the Nissan gave them a dollar anyway.

“That’s another forty cents you got, Kootie,” said Raffle as the light turned green. “You know, we might do better if you ditched the shades—makes you look like a pint-size doper.”

Kootie took off the sunglasses and looked mutely up at Raffle. He had no idea what color his eye socket was, but it was swollen enough to perceptibly narrow his vision.

“Well now, little man,” Raffle said, “you’ve had a busy day or two, haven’t you? Yeah, keep the shades—people will think I gave you that, otherwise.”

Kootie nodded and put the glasses back on—but not before he had nervously looked westward again.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

R
AFFLE
was obviously pleased with the money they made during the next ten minutes and he dug a laundry marking pen out of the pocket of his topmost shirt and, under the words
HOMELESS VIETNAM VET
, he added
WITH MOTHERLESS SON.

“We gonna make booyah bucks on this,” ‘said Raffle with satisfaction. “We probably be sleepin’ in motels every night.”

Kootie thought of sleeping on wheels. “I don’t mind a car,” he said, struggling to keep the impatience out of his voice. He still hadn’t seen the one-armed man, but he could imagine him watching from behind some wall.

“Good attitude,” Raffle said. “Hey, we should be shifting locations—you want a beer?”

Kootie blinked. “I’m only eleven.”

“Well, I’ll drink it if you don’t want it. Come on.”

They walked across the street to a little liquor store, Fred following closely on their heels, and Raffle bought a bottle of Corona in a narrow paper bag.

“Let’s head for the car,” he said as they walked back out onto the sidewalk.

The car was a twenty-year-old mustard-colored Ford Maverick parked behind a nearby Laundromat, and the back seat was piled with clothes and Maxell floppy-disk boxes and at least a dozen gray plastic videocassette rewinders. Fred hopped up onto the clutter when Raffle unlocked the door, and Raffle and Kootie sat in the front seats.

Raffle levered the cap off the beer bottle against the underside of the dashboard. In an affectedly deep voice, he said, “What’s your name, boy?”

Catching on that Raffle was pretending to be someone else, Kootie said, “Mayo. Uh, Jacko Mayo.”

“Very good.” Raffle took a long sip of the beer. “We used to live in La Mirada, that’s forty-five minutes south of here on the 5, okay? Four-bedroom house, only
place you ever lived. I used to be a car mechanic, but your mom was a legal secretary and she made the real money, but she didn’t have health insurance and when she got cancer we lost everything, and then she died. Nobody’s likely to ask you for anything more than that, but if it ever comes up, just start crying. Can you cry if you have to?”

Kootie thought about it. “Easy.”

“Great. Now are we black or white or Mexican or Indian or what?”

“To work for both of us? I’d just say—” He shrugged. “—we’re Angelenos. We just…grew up out of the sidewalks.”

“Good. Don’t remember no old days at all.” Raffle tilted up the bottle and drained the last of the beer. “Now, there’s some…things you’re gonna have to just get used to seeing, okay? Like if you suddenly moved to…Borneo or Australia or somewhere, they might do stuff that you were always taught was bad, but it’s okay there, right? I mean, as long as they don’t say
you’ve
got to do ’em. You just consider it higher education.”

“Right,” said Kootie cautiously.

“Okay. There’s a little nail in the ashtray, lemme have it, hm?”

Kootie found the nail and handed it to the man.

Raffle put the point of the nail into a little dimple in the base of the glass beer bottle, and then he picked up an old shoe from between the seats and whacked the head of the nail with it; the point was now inside the bottle, though the bottle hadn’t broken, and Raffle twisted it back out, then blew through the hole.

“All us good Dagwood-type dads smoke pipes,” he said. Then he reached under the seat and dragged up a box of Chore Boy scrubbing pads and prized a little cushion of steel wool out of the box. He tore off a bristly shred of the stuff and tucked it like a little bird’s nest into the neck of the bottle, and then replaced the rest of the pad and pushed the box back under the seat.

“If you see a one-time,” Raffle said, “don’t change your expression or look around, but slap me on the leg.”

Kootie remembered reading in the newspaper that
one-time
was a street term for policeman. “Is this,” he faltered, “some kind of—no offense—dope thing?”

“Just say yo,” Raffle agreed. Out of a hole in the double thickness of his shirt cuff he dug a tiny fragment of what seemed to be white stone, like a piece off one of the ones Kootie’s father had spread around the plants in the atrium pots, and Raffle carefully laid it in the nest of steel wool at the top of the empty beer bottle.

Raffle slouched down in the seat and held the bottle up to the textured plastic head liner, which Kootie now noticed was dotted with scorch marks, and the man put his mouth to the little hole he’d punched in the bottle’s base; then he flicked a long orange-plastic Cricket lighter and held the flame to the piece of rock as he sucked.

Kootie looked away as the bottle began to fill with pale smoke. His heart was pounding but he didn’t see any “one-times,” and in just a couple of seconds Raffle had opened the door and rolled the bottle away across the parking lot.

Raffle exhaled, and Kootie smelled burned steel wool and a faint chemical tang. “Never hang on to a pipe,” Raffle told him hoarsely as he began grinding the starter motor. “There’s always another at the next liquor store.”

“Dagwood
probably saved ’em,” said Kootie bravely.

Raffle laughed as the engine finally caught and he clanked the transmission into reverse. “Yeah,” he said, still hoarse. “He probably had all kinds of oak pipe racks, full of cans and bottles. Blondie would dust ’em, and sometimes break one of the bottles and make him real mad—
I had that Corona broke in perfect, you bitch!
”

Kootie laughed nervously. Raffle made a left turn onto Fourth Street and angled into the far right lane to get on the southbound 110 Freeway.

“I thought we were going to Silver Lake,” said Kootie. “Isn’t that north?”

“Detour for medical supplies.”

T
HEY GOT
off three miles south at the Vernon Avenue exit, and Raffle parked in the empty lot of a burned-out gas station.

“The plan’s this,” he said as he rolled up the driver’sside window. “Me and Fred will be gone for twenty minutes or so. You keep the doors locked, and if anybody tries to mess with you, just lean on the horn until they go away, right? A one-time, roll the window down and smile and say you’re waitin’ for your dad. When we get back, it’s dinnertime.”

Kootie nodded, and Raffle grinned and got out of the car. He folded the seat forward so that Fred could scramble out onto the pavement, and then the door was shut and locked and the two of them had gone loping away down the sidewalk and around a corner.

Kootie realized that Raffle was going to go spend some of the afternoon’s income on more drugs, but he never even considered getting out of the car and walking away. He remembered watching the riots on TV six months ago, and he imagined that the people around here would break his face off with bricks if they so much as saw him on the sidewalk.

He wondered what kind of food Raffle generally ate. Kootie was ready to eat just about anything at all.

He hiked up on the car seat and looked around. Dimly in the bay of the ruined gas station he could see the brown shell of a burned-up car, still raised up off the floor on the hydraulic lift; Kootie wondered if the owner had ever come by to see if any progress was being made on whatever repairs he’d brought the car in for. The tall palm trees along the sidewalks were black silhouettes against the darkening sky, and lights had begun to come on in shop windows up and down the street. Raffle’s car smelled like unbathed dog, and Kootie wished he were allowed to roll down the windows…Big speakers were playing music somewhere not too far away, but all Kootie could hear was the pounding bass and a lot of angry, rhythmic shouting.