Expiration Date (26 page)

After no more than two seconds the plane flickered and disappeared, but before winking out of visibility it had banked on the inland wind, as if headed northeast, toward Hollywood.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

B
ACK
in his Olive Street office after court, well in time for a healthful lunch, J. Francis Strube tossed his briefcase onto the long oak credenza and slumped his oversized frame into the padded leather McKie chair behind his desk.

He had an appointment this afternoon, some guy whose wife was divorcing him. The man had sounded almost apologetic on the phone, clearly reluctant to hire an attorney because he hoped his wife would abandon the divorce action and come back to him. Strube would sympathize during this first consultation, let the guy ramble and emote and probably weep; during later sessions Strube could begin to raise his eyebrows over the man’s willingness to let the wife take so much stuff. Strube would interject,
Oh, she’ll need it because she’ll be doing a lot of
entertaining,
eh?
delivered in a tone that would make Strube seem like a sympathetically angered friend.
Well, if you want to let her have everything…

Eventually Strube could get a man to refuse to part with a vacuum cleaner that he might never have actually used, or possibly ever even seen.

It took more time, but Strube preferred nurturing rapacity in these timid clients to flattering the egos of the villains who just wanted to ditch the old wife and marry the twenty-year-old
sex…pot
. For the latter sort Strube would have to say, in tones of polite surprise, things like
You’re
fifty?
Good Lord, you don’t look a day over forty.
And,
How did you put up with this for so long?

Anyway, the timid ones needed attorneys. What they initially wanted, like first-time Driving Under the Influence offenders, was to appear in court in humble
proper
, not realizing that judges had all been attorneys once, and planned to be again after they retired, and wanted to make of these fools examples of how badly unrepresented people fared.

In a courthouse hallway this morning another attorney had told Strube a riddle.

Question:
What do a lawyer and a sperm cell have in common?

Strube pursed his lips and leaned forward to pick up the newspaper that Charlotte had left on the desk. The telephone rang, but Charlotte would get it. Strube made it a point never to answer the phone on spec.

He waited, but the intercom didn’t buzz. That was good, she was fielding whatever it was. He let himself start to read.

He saw that Ross Perot was claiming to have backed out of the presidential race only because of threats from the Bush-campaign people. He smiled. Strube never voted, but he liked to see things shaken up. “Time for a Change!” was a political slogan that always appealed to him. He was about to flip the front page when he noticed the box at the bottom.

FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM

Strube read the story quickly, peripherally aware that his heartbeat was speeding up. When he had finished it, he pushed a button on the intercom.

“Charlotte!” he squeaked. “Get in here and look at this.” No, he thought immediately, she might try to get the credit herself. “Wait, get me—” he began again, but she had already opened his office door and was staring in at him curiously.

She was wearing another of the anonymous dark jacket-and-skirt combinations to which she had been confining herself ever since he’d made a blundering pass at her six months ago. “Look at what?” she asked.

“Perot says Bush was going to wreck his daughter’s wedding,” he said absently, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Did you read about that? Say, get me the telephone number of…” What had been the name of the damned snuff? Ouchie? “Goudie! Goudie Scottish Snuff, uh. Company. G-O-U-D-I-E. It’s in San Francisco.”

“Snuff?”

Strube raised the back of his pudgy hand to his nose and sniffed loudly. “Snuff. Like lords and ladies used to do. Powdered tobacco.”

“Do you want me to call them?”

“No, just get me the number.”

Charlotte nodded, mystified, and walked back out to the reception desk, closing his office door behind her.

If Nicky Bradshaw’s still alive, thought Strube excitedly, he’s gotta still be doing that snuff; and it’s a clue I’ll bet not a lot of people remember. And I’ll bet nobody but me remembers the actual brand name. God knows I ordered it often enough.

Strube stood up and walked quickly across the carpet to the window overlooking Olive, and he stared down at the gleaming multicolored car roofs rippling through the lanes like beetles. Strube had a new BMW himself, but from up here it could look no different from any of the cars below him now. He was a member of Sports Club LA on Sepulveda—he had even got occasional business from his ad in the club’s net-
working newsletter—and he was proud of his healthful diet regimen, years having passed since he had last eaten real eggs or bacon or butter or sour cream; and his apartment on Sunset was expensive, but…

Aside from his suits and the sectional furniture and some signed sailing prints on the walls, the apartment was pretty bare—in truth, about half of his worldly goods were in the goddamn credenza here in the office, along with the ceiling fan that he’d never taken out of its box and the routed cherry wood decoupaged
J. FRANCIS STRUBE
name plaque that a client had handcrafted for him and that he’d been embarrassed to put out on his desk because people might think he represented hippie dopers.

But he
could
be…the attorney who located Spooky.

Answer: Each of them has one chance in two million of becoming a human being.

Of becoming somebody.

It seemed to him now that, when he was twenty and twenty-one, he had mailed orders to the Goudie Snuff Company as often as he had mailed solicitation letters to the people whose names and addresses had appeared on the thrice-weekly foreclosure lists.

He had worked as a legal secretary for Nicholas Bradshaw in ‘74 and ‘75, in Seal Beach. Bradshaw had handled mostly bankruptcy cases, which often came around to involving divorce and child custody, and young Strube had proved to have a natural knack for the tactics of family breakup.

Strube had planned to go into show-business law—after law school he had let his mousy brown hair grow long and had worn crazy little granny glasses, and he had gone to work for Bradshaw mainly because Bradshaw had once been an actor—but somewhere along the line Bradshaw had developed an aversion to the TV and movie business; and without a contact, an in, access, Strube hadn’t been able to get any of the industry’s law firms to consider taking him on.

Then after Bradshaw had just…
up and disappeared
…in ‘75, Strube had been left without any job at all. He had hastily gone to work for a divorce and personal-injury attorney, and passed the bar in ‘81. At last in ‘88 had been able to open his own practice…but he was still just disassembling families.

The intercom buzzed, and Strube walked back to his desk and pushed the button. “Yeah, Charlotte.” He wrote down the 415-area number she read to him. At least Goudie was still in business.

Back in ‘74 and ‘75, Bradshaw had kept a box of snuff cans in his desk, and when he had paperwork to do he would open the box and lay out half a dozen cans, like a buffet, and sniff a bit of this one, a couple of snorts of that one, and a chaser of another. He had gone through so much of the stuff that he found it easiest to have his legal secretary order directly from the company.

Strube punched the number into the telephone.

Bradshaw had paid young Strube a generous weekly salary, and never cared what hour Strube came into the office or went home, as long as the work got done, and he had
been lavish with bonuses—and, too, he’d always been paranoid, afraid of being findable, always varying his schedule and never divulging, even to Strube, his home address or phone number; wherever he was now, he clearly didn’t want to be found. But…

“Goudie Snuff Company,” chirped a voice from the phone.

“Hi, my name is J. Francis Strube. I’m in Los Angeles and I’m marketing a line of—” What, he thought nervously. “—traditional Scottish products, tartan sweaters and walking sticks and so on, and I’d like to buy a copy of your mailing list.”

A
NGELICA
A
NTHEM
Elizalde slumped wearily in the RTD bus seat with her forehead against the cool window, and she watched the shops and old houses of Sixth Street, fogged by her breath on the glass, swing past in the sunlight outside.

She wondered if people still used the word
chicana
, and she wondered when and where she had stopped being one. The women in the seats around her were happily chatting in Spanish, and twice they had referred to her as
“la Angla sonalienta al lado de la ventana”
—the sleepy Anglo lady by the window. Elizalde had wanted to smile and, in Spanish, say something back about the long Greyhound ride across the desert yesterday, then had realized that she no longer had the vocabulary.

Elizalde’s mother had always told her that she looked
mestizo
—European Spanish, rather than
indigena
. Her face was long and angular and pale, like a saint in an El Greco painting, and in her Oklahoma Levi jeans and her old Graceland sweatshirt she probably did look Anglo. It occurred to her that she probably even spoke with a bit of an Oklahoma accent now.

At one point during the long night at the Greyhound station—waiting for the dawn, not able to afford a taxi and not wanting to walk anywhere on the menacing dark streets—she had washed her face in the ladies’ room, and had stared in the mirror at the vertical grooves in her cheeks and the lines around her eyes. Her face looked older than her thirty-four years, though the rest of her was somehow still as trim and taut as she’d been in her twenties—or even in her teens.

Immature? she wondered now as she watched the old houses sweep past outside the bus window. Say—she smiled nervously—arrested adolescent.

It seemed to her now that there had been something naively Quixotic about her psychiatric career and her stubbornly terminal argument with Dr. Alden. In her private practice, in her own clinic, she had been able to make her own rules—and then had just fled the state and changed her name when the whole arrangement had blown up.

(Almost literally blown up—the fire department had managed to save the building.)

She had never married, nor ever had children. In idly psychoanalyzing herself, she had once decided that her “morbid dread” of pregnancy derived from the time when, at the age of three, she had climbed into an old milk can in the living room in
Norco and got stuck—and, to hear her mother describe the event in later years, lost her mind. It was a three-foot-tall, forty-quart metal can that her parents had kept in the corner and tossed spare change into, and when toddler Angelica got stuck inside it, she had apparently had a severe claustrophobic reaction. After her father had failed to pull her out, and had failed to break the can open with a hammer (all of this no doubt compounding little Angelica’s terror), Angelica’s grandmother had been summoned from the house across the street. The old woman, who had luckily done mid-wifing for half a century, ordered Angelica’s father to turn the can upside down, and then had delivered the toddler out of the can as though she were guiding a newborn baby out of the womb, head first and then one shoulder at a time. The afterbirth had been a shower of pennies and nickels and dimes.

Her mother had always told her how, apparently out of regret for having caused so much trouble, baby Angelica must have awakened late that night and gone into the dark living room and gathered up all the spilled coins, separated them out by denomination, and then ranked them in stacks on a table; and her mother had forever insisted, with obviously sincere astonishment and pride, that the baby had even arranged the coins in chronological order of mint date, with the oldest coins on top.

Angelica had never believed that she had got up and moved the coins at all, but even as a child she had known better than to say so to her mother, who would probably have called the grandmother over again to do some distressing kind of homespun exorcism. Perhaps as a child Angelica had known that there were some borders that it was best not to include in one’s maps. If so, she had recently learned it again.

The women in the bus seats around her this morning had no such compunctions. One woman was cautioning the others against leaving the living-room drapes open at night this weekend, and Elizalde at first assumed that it was a precaution against being shot in a drive-by shooting; and it might have been, partly, but after a few moments she understood that it was mainly to keep from calling to oneself the attention of the witches that would surely be flying around in
calabazas y bolos fuegos
, gourds and fireballs. Another woman said that she would be smoking cornhusk cigarettes every night for the next week or so; and one old grandmother in the very back seat said she’d be going out to Santa Monica on Friday night to feed her “
piedra iman
” in the sand and seawater. When Angelica Elizalde had been growing up, a
piedra iman
was a magnet; perhaps the term now meant something else.