Expiration Date (48 page)

K
OOTIE WAS
slammed sideways across the back seat of the minivan with a man’s weight on top of him crushing his ribs, and he was choking and gagging on a bulky plastic cylinder that had somehow got into his mouth; the flashlight was jammed between their bodies somewhere, and he could see nothing in the darkness. He knew the man’s face was right above his own because of the harsh hot breaths battering at his right ear and eyelashes.

Something was repeatedly punching him in the side over the steel-cable belt, audibly tearing the denim jacket. He knew it must be the blade of the knife, being stopped by the metal coils of the I-ON-A-CO belt; but the stabs were wild, and he was sure that the next one wouldn’t be another blunted impact but a cold plunge into his guts.

He shoved his tongue against the flat bottom of the plastic cylinder in his mouth, but before he could spit it out to scream and bite, his jaws involuntarily clamped tight around the thing.

At the same moment,
No, Kootie!
shouted a voice in his head; it was Edison—and the boy train-vendor in the hallucinations had been Edison too.
I’ll do this!

At that moment the knife blade grated off of the top edge of the belt cable and the point of it stabbed against the bone of one of his ribs. Kootie sagged in ringing shock.

But an instant later he had inhaled deeply through his whistling nostrils, and then his head was whipped around to lace the man who was killing him, and his lower teeth popped the lid off the plastic cylinder.

And he blew a hard exhalation straight up into the man’s wide-open mouth.

The man drove a knee solidly into Kootie’s stomach, so that Kootie’s long exhalation ended in a sharp, yelping wheeze—but the man had jackknifed off the seat, boomed hard against the sliding door as the flashlight whirled around his tumbling body like a crazy firefly, and then he had bounced onto his belly across the console, kicking his legs in the empty air so that Kootie heard popping tendons rather than impacts. A moment later Kootie cringed to hear him vomiting so hard and loud that the terrified boy thought the man must be splitting open his face, popgunning his eyeballs, his sinus and nose bones cracking out to fall onto the carpeted floorboards.

Kootie’s left hand was gently slapping his ribs, and when his fingers found the knife grip they held on and then carefully pulled the blade out of the hole it had punched in the denim. Kootie winced and whimpered to feel the point pull out of his flesh and the edge violin across the coils of the belt, but he just held still, knowing it was Edison that was working his hand.

Kootie lay half on his side across the seat, and he could feel hot blood roll wet down across his stomach from his cut right rib. He nearly jumped when he felt wet
steel slide past his right wrist, and then that hand had twisted and was free, and had “snatched the knife.

At last he spat out the emptied cylinder, and he was sobbing with urgent claustrophobic fright. “Get me out of here, mister!” he whimpered. “Oh, please, mister, get me
out of here!”

He was anxious to be just a cooperative passenger in his own body now—gratefully he felt his right hand cut free his left wrist, and then he was sitting up and bending over to cut the tape around his ankles.

The one-armed man had heaved himself forward with each abdomen-abrading retch, and now his feet boomed against the van’s ceiling as he toppled over the console to the floor.
“Edison!”
he said loudly, grating out the syllables like cinder blocks.
”Wast—thee—agayn?”

Kootie didn’t know whether it was himself or Edison that worked the door handle and pulled back the minivan’s sliding side door. He stepped out, down to the floor of the truck, rocking as if he were aboard a boat, and he groped his way in darkness to the rippling, sectional metal wall that was the truck’s door.

The cut in his side was just a point of tingling chill, but he could feel blood • weighing down the folds of his shirt over his belt, and a hot trickle ran down the inside of his leg.

“Kootie!” he gasped.
“Breathe slower!
You’re going to make us faint.” Kootie’s mouth snapped shut, and he made himself count four heartbeats for-every inhalation, and four for every exhalation.

Without his volition his right hand went to his side and pressed against the cut. Behind him he heard feet thumping and scraping—inside the minivan, the one-armed man was up.

With his left hand Kootie slapped hurriedly at the ribbed inner surface of the truck’s door until he found a blocky steel lever, and he braced himself on his good foot and heaved the lever upward.

Dazzling sunlight flooded the truck’s interior as the door clattered upward, folding along its track overhead. Without his sunglasses, the day outside seemed terribly bright.

Pavement was rushing past down there beyond the toes of his Reeboks, and he was squinting out at the windshields of oncoming cars; a low office building and a red-roofed Pizza Hut were swinging past off to his left. The people in the cars might be gaping, pointing at him, but their windshields were just blank patches of reflected blue sky.

Kootie glanced behind him, into the dimness of the truck’s interior, and he could see the one-armed man crawling down out of the minivan headfirst, onto the truck floor.
Breathe slower!
Kootie reminded himself.

“What do I do. Mr. Edison?” Kootie cried, his voice not echoing now but breezing away in the open air.

He sensed no answer; and when he tried to let the ghost take control of his body again, he had to grab the bottom edge of the half-raised door, for his knees had simply buckled and he would have fallen out of the truck.

He had to step back then, for the truck was slowing down.

Kootie freed his bloody hand from his side and waved it broadly at the cars following the truck, mouthing
Slow down, I’m getting out! Don’t run over me!
and pointing down at the street. He glanced down past his shoes—the street was still moving by awfully fast, and his belly and an instant later his neck quailed like shaken ice water.

You’ll tumble, he thought; even if he slows a lot more than this, you won’t be able to land running fast enough, and you’ll tumble like a Raggedy Andy doll. He imagined his skull socking the pavement, his elbows snapping backward, shinbones split and telescoped…

He couldn’t do it. But if he waited another couple of seconds, the one-armed man would be on him again.

Then, with an abrupt hallucinatory burst of glaring red and blue flashes on his retinas, a gleaming black-and-white police car had surged into the gap between the truck’s bumper and the car behind. A half-second segment of siren shocked his ears, and Kootie swayed backward again as the truck slowed still more, and Kootie saw the front end of the police car dip as it braked to avoid hitting the truck.

And Kootie jumped.

His kneecaps banged the hood of the police car, and his palms and forehead smacked the windshield, cracking it with a muffled creak; in nearly the same instant, with a boom that shook the very air, the windshield crystallized into an opaque white honeycomb as a hole was punched through it next to Kootie’s bloody right hand.

Kootie’s right hip and shoulder hit the windshield then, and the glass gave beneath him like starched white canvas. And another boom rocked the world as a hole was punched through the wrecked webwork of glass near his upraised left knee; the windshield dissolved into a spray of little green cubes, and he was sitting on the dashboard.

He whipped his head around to squint ahead at the truck. The one-armed man’s face was right above the truck-bed floor, and in his one hand wobbled the silver muzzle of a gun. As Kootie stared, a hammer-stroke of glare eclipsed the gun, and he felt a jolt in the police car as the boom of the gunshot rolled over him.

The police car was screeching to a halt now, slewing sideways, but Kootie was able to hang on to the rounded inside edges of the dashboard, and though he was rocked back and forth he was not thrown off; even when the car behind rear-ended the police car with a squeal and bang and tinkle of broken glass, he just lifted his shoulders and dug in with his butt and let his chin roll down and up.

The police car was stopped at last. The orange-and-black Southern California Edison truck was wobbling to the curb against further braking and honking horns
from behind, and Kootie scrambled to the fender and hopped down to the asphalt. The pavement under his feet was so steady, and he was so torqued, that he had to take several hopping steps to keep from falling over.

A couple of people had got out of stopped cars and were hurrying up. “Has someone got…change for a telephone call?” Kootie shouted, to his own surprise.

“Here you go, kid,” said a woman absently, handing him a quarter. She was staring past him, at whatever was going on with the police and the one-armed man.

“Thank you,” Kootie said. He was wobbling dizzily as he stepped up the curb, and a man in a business suit called something to him. “Man back there,” Kootie yelled, “bleeding bad. Where’s a telephone?”

The man pointed at a liquor store and said, “Dial nine-one-one!”

Sure, thought Kootie wildly as he wobbled onward through the cold sunlight. Nine-one-one. I’d get to talk to my mom and dad again, drunk as fig beetles by now; Edison could shoot the breeze with the fat lady from the supermarket parking lot. At least I’d get my quarter back.

He glanced back, but the doors of the police car hadn’t opened, and, blinking against the silvery glare of the sunlight, Kootie couldn’t see the one-armed man. He wished he hadn’t lost the sunglasses.

“Where are we going?” he whispered, with timid hope, when he had limped around the corner of the liquor store and was lacing a long alley with Dumpsters and old mattresses shored up against the graffiti-fouled walls.

“Anywhere relatively private,” Edison said, and Kootie exhaled and began sweating with relief—the old man was not only back, but seemed to be sensible again, and would now Lake care of everything. Keep pressing your hand hard against the cut, it’ll slow the bleeding. I need to get a look at this wound, and then we’ll go buy whatever sort of stuff we need to get you repaired. And some liquor. I really don’t think we can get by, here, without some liquor.”

“Shit, no,” said Kootie, stumbling forward down the alley.

His face was cold and sweaty, but he smiled, for Edison apparently wasn’t going to scold him for his language this time.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

D
IOS
te guarde tan linda” said Angelica Elizalde softly into the sea breeze. She had taken off her sneakers in order to wade out in the low, breakwater-tamed surf of Los Angeles Harbor. The lights of the
Queen Mary
rippled across the dark water, and Elizalde shivered now when she looked at the vast old ship out there by San Pedro.

She had walked down to this narrow stretch of beach from the bus stop at Cherry and Seventh, and she was still putting off the decision of whether or not to meet the Peter Sullivan person up in the parking lot on the bluff. She glanced at her watch and saw that she still had half an hour in which to decide.

She paused and looked back up the shore. A hundred yards west of hen the Mexican women’s fire still fluttered and threw sparks on the breeze. She might just plod back there and talk to them some more. The bruises on her knees and hip were aching in the cold, and it would be nice to sit by the fire, among people who could hear her secrets and not consider her insane.

Elizalde had walked up to the fire when the sun was still a flattened red coal in the molten western sky, and in her exhaustion her Spanish had effortlessly come back to her, so that she was able to return the greetings of the women and make small talk.

She had smiled at the toddler daughter of one, and the woman had touched the girl’s forehead and quickly said,
“Dios te guarde tan linda”
—God keep you pretty baby. Elizalde had remembered her grandmother doing the same whenever a stranger looked at one of the children. It was to deflect
mal ojo,
the evil eye. But Elizalde also remembered that it was a routine precaution, and she smiled at the mother too, and crossed herself. Only after the mother had smiled back, and Elizalde had accepted the gestured offer of a seat on the sand beside the fire, had she felt hypocritical.

Veladoros,
devotional candles in tall glasses, ringed the fire; and Elizalde soon learned that these women were here waiting for midnight, when, it then being
the Friday before
El Día de los Muertos,
they would bathe their
piedras imanes
in the seawater.

Elizalde realized that she had not misunderstood the word yesterday—it did mean magnets. Her new friend Dolores untied her handkerchief and showed her her own, a doughnut-sized magnet from a stereo speaker. The best ones, Elizalde had gathered, were the little ones from old telephones—stubby cylinders, no bigger than a dime in cross section, that looked like the smoking “snakes” that her brothers had always lit on Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July.

Witches used the magnets as part of the ritual that transformed them into animals, she learned, but
piedras imanes
were good things to have around the house to attract good luck and deflect spells. The magnets needed to be fed—by tossing them into dirt or sand so that they became bristly with iron filings—and it was a good idea to immerse them in the sea on this one Friday every year.

As she’d sat there and listened to the gossip and the jokes and the occasional scolding of one of the children for playing too close to the fire, Elizalde had lain back against a blanket over an ice chest, and from time to time had made such answers and remarks as she imagined her grandmother would have.