Expiration Date (51 page)

Then, with a pad taped over the closed and cleaned cut, Edison had had a sip of the rum himself. When Kootie had floundered back over the hedge and started down the sidewalk, he had seemed to be walking on the deck of a boat, and Edison steered him into a
taquería
to eat some enchiladas and salsa and drink several cups of Coke. After that Kootie had been sober but sleepy, and they had found the laundromat, had furtively marked up the wall outside it, and finally had gone in to nap in one of the seats. The nap had continued, with interruptions, all night.

He shivered now in the morning breeze and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he must be sober, but the pavement still didn’t seem firmly moored.

He felt his mouth open involuntarily, and he wearily braced himself for forcing it shut against some crazy outburst, but Edison just used it to say, grumpily, “Where are we now?”

“Walking on Western,” said Kootie, quietly even though there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Looking for a bus to take us to a beach.”

“Final discorporation
is on my agenda today, is that it? Why did we have to outside so early? It’s cold. It was warm back in that automat.”

Each spoken syllable was an effort, and Kootie wished Edison wouldn’t use so many of them. “They washed the chalk off the wall,” he said hoarsely. Cars were rumbling past at his left, and his voice wasn’t loud, but he knew hear him.

“Ah! Then you’re a clever lad, to have got away quickly.” Kootie’s mouth opened very wide then, so that the cold air got all the way in to his back teeth, and he was afraid Edison was going to bellow something that would be audible to early-morning workers who might already be in these shadowed tax offices and closed movie-rental shops—but it was just a jaw-creaking yawn. “I shouldn’t stay out here, in my excited state, like this. Compasses will be wagging. I’ll go back to sleep. Holler for me if you—
mff!”

Kootie had stumbled on a high curb and fallen to his knees.

“What’s the matter?” said Edison too loudly. Kootie took the ending r sound and prolonged it into a groan that rose to a wail. “Don’t talk so much,” Kootie said despairingly. “I can’t breathe when you do.” He sniffed. “I bet we didn’t get one full or yelling at their kids or dropping baby bottles.” He tried to struggle back to his feet, and wound up resting his forehead on the sidewalk. “I can still taste those enchiladas,” he whispered to the faint trowel lines in the pavement “And the rum.”

“This won’t do,” came Edison’s voice out of Kootie’s raw throat Kootie’s arms and legs flexed and then acted in coordination, and he got his feet under himself and straightened all the way back up. Slanting morning sunlight lanced needles of reflected white glare off of car windshields into his watering eyes.

“You’re just not used to the catnap system,” said Edison kindly. “I can go for weeks on a couple of interrupted hours a night.
You
go to sleep, now—I’ll take the wheel for the next couple of miles.”

“Can we do that?” asked Kootie. He left his mouth loose for Edison’s reply, but had to closed had to close it when he felt himself starting to drool.

“Certainly. What you do is stand still for a moment here, and close your eyes—then in half a minute or so I’ll open your eyes but you’ll already have started to go to sleep, get it?” You’ll go ahead and relax and you won’t fall. I’ll hold us up, and walk and talk. Okay?” Kootie nodded. “Close your eyes, now, and relax.”

Kootie did, and he let himself fall away toward sleep, only peripherally aware of still being up in the air, and of the daylight when his eyes were eventually opened again. It was like falling asleep in a tree house over a busy street.

A
ND HIS
confused memories and worries wandered outside the yard of his com I and began bickering among themselves, and assumed color and voices and became disjointed dreams.

His gray-haired father was at the front door of their Beverly Hills house, arguing with someone from the school district again. Sometimes Kootie’s parents would keen him home from school when science classes prompted him to ask difficult questions on topics like the actual properties of crystals and the literal meanings of words like
energy
and
dimension.

“We’re saving it for the boy,” his father was saying angrily. “We’re not selfish here. In my youth I had the clear opportunity to become a nearly perfect
jagadguru
but I sacrificed that ambition, I unfitted myself by committing a theft, so that the boy could become the
jagadguru
perfectly, in psychic yin-and-yang twinhood with one who was the greatest of the unredeemed seers. The unredeemed one won’t be able to accompany our boy to godhood, but he will be able to achieve redemption for himself by serving as the boy’s guide through the astral regions. Right now the guide must wait—masked in the boy’s
persona
ikon, as he will eventually occupy a place in the boy’s
persona.
In order for the union to be seamless, it must occur after the boy has achieved puberty.”

Kootie had heard his father say much the same thing to his mother, on the nights Kootie had tiptoed back up the hall after his bedtime. It all had to do with the Dante statue, and the drunks and crazy people who wanted to talk to Don Tay.

His father waved ineffectually. “Clear off, or I’ll have no choice but to summon the police.”

But now Kootie could see the man standing grinning on the front doorstep, and it was the one-armed man with the tiny black unrecessed eyes.

Kootie flinched, and the dream shifted—he was lying in the back seat of a car, half asleep, rocking gently with the shock absorbers on the undulating highway and watching the door handle gleam in reflected oblique light when the occasional streetlamp swept past out in the darkness. He was relaxed, slumped in the tobacco-scented leather upholstery—this wasn’t Raffle’s Maverick, nor the old marooned Dodge Dart he had slept in on Wednesday night, nor the Fussels’ minivan. He was too warm and comfortable to shift around and look at the interior, but he didn’t have to. He knew it was a Model T Ford. The driver was definitely his father, though sometimes that was Jiddu Parganas and sometimes it was Thomas Edison.

Kootie smiled sleepily. He didn’t know where they were driving to, and he didn’t need to know.

But suddenly there was a screech of brakes, and Kootie was thrown forward into the back of the front seat—he hit it with his open palms and the toes of his sneakers.

T
HE DREAM
impact jolted him out of sleep, and so he was awake when his palms and the toes of his sneakers hit the cinder-block wall an instant later; using the momentum of the leap he had found himself making, he flung one leg over the top of the wall, and before he boosted himself up and dropped into the dirt lot on the other side, he glanced behind him.

The glance made him scramble the rest of the way over the wall and land running, and he was across the lot and over a chain-link fence before he had taken and exhaled two fast breaths, and then he was pelting away down a palm-shaded alley, looking for some narrow L-turn that would put still more angles and distance between himself and the Western Avenue sidewalk.

A pickup truck had been pulled in to the curb, and five men in sleeveless white undershirts had hopped out of the bed of it to corner him; but what had driven the fatigue out of his muscles was a glimpse of the bag-thing one of the men was carrying.

It was a coarse burlap sack, flopping open at the top to show the clumps of hair it was stuffed with, and a battered Raiders baseball cap had been attached to the rim and was bobbing up and down as the man carrying it stepped up the curb; but the sack was rippling as if a wind were buffeting it, and harsh laughter was shouting out of the loose flaps. As Kootie had scrambled over the wall, the bag had called to him,
“Tu sabes quien trae las Haves, Chavez!”
and barked out another terrible laugh.

Kootie was beginning to limp now on his weak ankle, and his cut rib was aching hotly. He crossed a street of old houses and hurried down another alley, ceaselessly glancing over his shoulder and ready to duck behind one of the old parked cars if he glimpsed the bumper of a pickup truck rounding the corner.

“What was that?”
he asked finally in a grating whisper, and even just forming the question squeezed tears of fright out of his eyes.

Even Edison’s voice was unsteady. “Local witch-boys,” he panted. “They tracked us with a compass, I’ve got to assume. I’m going to go under, clathrate, so they can’t track me. Holler if you need me—”

“But what was that?”

“Ahhh.” Kootie’s shoulders were raised and lowered. “They…got a ghost, captured one, and had it animate the trash in that bag, apparently. It’s got no legs,
so
it can’t run away…but…well, you heard it? I was afraid you did. It can talk. Cheerful thing, hmm?” The bravura tone of Edison’s last remark was hollow.

“It woke me up.”

“Yes, I felt you wake up in the instant before we hit the wall. It’s like hearing the tiny snap of a live switch opening, just before the collapsing electric field makes a big spark arc across the gap, isn’t it?”

“Just like that.”

Kootie was still walking quickly, and he could tell that it was himself placing one foot in front of the other now. ‘Where do I go now?” he asked, ashamed of the pleading note in his voice.

“God, boy—just walk straight away from here, fast. As soon as I’m under consciousness you should start looking for someplace to hide for a while—behind a hedge, or go upstairs in some office building, or hide in a boring section of the library.”

“Okay,” said Kootie, clenching his teeth and looking ahead to the next street. “Don’t hide too deep, okay?”

“I’ll be not even as far away as your nose.”

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

S
HERMAN
Oaks sat shivering in the early-morning sunlight on a wall beside the parking lot of an
A.M. P.M.
minimart. His companions, two ragged middle-aged men who were passing back and forth a bottle of Night Train in a paper bag, were ghosts, old enough and solid enough to throw shadows and to contain fortified wine without obviously leaking. They were pointing at a skinny lady in shorts and high heels at the street corner, and laughing
(“FM shoes, ‘fuck me’ shoes, hyuck-hyuck-hyuck”),
but Oaks just clutched his elbows and shivered and stared down at the litter of paper cups and beer cans below his dangling feet.

He was starving. The four
piece-a-shit
ghosts he had inhaled yesterday were all the sustenance he had had for more than three days, and the Bony Express was a shrill chorus in his head and a seeping of blood from the corners of his fingernails.

He hadn’t slept last night. He hadn’t even been able to stop moving—walking along sidewalks, riding buses, climbing the ivied grades of freeway shoulders. During the course of the long night he had found his way to a couple of his secluded ghost traps, but though the creatures had been there, hovering bewilderedly around the palindromes and the jigsaw-puzzle pieces, he hadn’t been able to sniff them all the way up into his head; they had gone in through his nostrils smoothly enough, but just bumped around inside his lungs until he had to exhale, and then they were back out on the dirt again, stupidly demanding to know what had happened. He had even inhaled over one of the antismoke crowd’s
L.A. CIGAR
—
TOO TRAGICAL
ashtrays in an all-night doughnut shop, and got nothing but ashes up his nose.

He was jammed up.

The “big ghost” that had been shining over the magical landscape of Los Angeles for the past four days had been the ghost of
Thomas Alva Edison.
It had been
Edison's
face on the collapsed ectoplasm figure at the Music Center, the day before yesterday. And now Edison had
(again!)
fed Oaks a rotted ghost—and it had jammed him up, and he was starving.