Expiration Date (61 page)

“Chalk?” asked Sullivan, trying to concentrate.

Their father had shrugged, and his remark about Speedy Alka-Seltzer had hung in the air as he turned away from them, toward the foam-streaked waves, and young Pete had been able to see the frail white hair on the backs of his father’s shoulders fluffing in the ocean breeze.

“The friction of a piece of wet chalk varies with changes in its electric charge,” Kootie said. “Without a charge it’s toothy and has lots of friction, but it’s instantly slick when there’s a current….”

The three cans of Hires Root Beer were laid out like artillery shells, awaiting their father’s return from his swim. There was one for him, and one each for Pete and Elizabeth. Their stepmom had explained that she didn’t drink soda pop, so there were only three cans.

“…A spring connected to the center of the diaphragm,” Kootie was saying, drawing with his hands in the stale dim air, “with the other end pressed against the side of the rotating chalk cylinder. The fluctuations in the current from your Ford coil will change the mechanical resistance of the chalk, so the needle will wiggle, you see, as the chalk rapidly changes from slick to scratchy, and the wiggle will be conveyed to the diaphragm.”

“It sounds goofy,” quavered Sullivan, forcing himself to pay attention to what Kootie was saying, and not to the intrusive, unstoppable, intolerably resurrected memory.

“It works,” said Kootie flatly. “A young man named George Bernard Shaw happened to be working for me in London in ‘79, and maybe you’ve read his description of my electromotograph receiver in his book
The Irrational Knot.”

Sullivan shivered, for he was suddenly sure that the ghost this boy carried was, in fact, Thomas Edison. Sullivan’s voice was humble as he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

But he didn’t add, “sir.” Aside from police officers, there was only one man he had ever called “sir.”

Their stepmother didn’t even bother to act very surprised when Pete and Elizabeth screamed at her that their father was in trouble out in the water. The old man had swum out through the waves in his usual briskly athletic Australian crawl, but he was floundering and waving now, way out beyond the surf line, and their stepmother had only got to her feet and shaded her eyes to watch.

“…and the carborundum bulb should be sensitive enough to pick the ghost up, and reflect his presence in the brush discharge. He should easily be able to vary it, so it’s a
signal
that’s going through the lens into the Langmuir viscosity gauge…” Sullivan blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes.

Their stepmother hadn’t eaten any of the potato salad, and she seemed to be fine; but she wouldn’t even take one step across the dry sand toward the water, and so the twins had gone running down to the surf all by themselves, even though cramps were wringing their stomachs. …

Kootie had asked Sullivan a question, and he struggled to remember what it had been. “Oh,” he said finally, “right. We’ll have primed the quartz filament with a ground vibration, set it ringing by waving a magnet past the little swiveling iron armature in the gauge, and then I guess we get rid of the magnet, outside the building. The quartz starts from a peak tone, and then the vibration will damp down as the quartz loses its initial’its initial
ping.
We’ll gradually lose volume, but even with the damping radiometer effects of the signal it’s getting from the focused light, and from friction with the trace of mercury gas in the gauge, the sustaining vibration should last a good while.”

Both of the twins had paused when they were chest deep and wobbling on tiptoe in the cold, surging water. But Elizabeth let the buoyancy take her, and began dog-paddling out toward their distant suffering father; while Pete, frightened of the deep water that was
frightening their father, and of the clenching pain in his abdomen, had turned and floundered back toward shore.

“You’re the antenna,” said Kootie, who was now looking down at him curiously from his perch on the couch back, “but you’ll need a homing beacon too, a lure.”

And after a while Elizabeth had dragged herself back, exhausted and sick and alone.

“I’m that as well,” said Sullivan bleakly. “I’m still his son.”

They had not of course opened the three Hires cans, though the twins were destined to glimpse the cans again twenty-seven years later…again in Venice.

And Sullivan’s face went cold—the memory of Kelley Keith’s face blandly observing the drowning of her husband had overlaid memories of deLarava’s face, and at long, long last he realized that they were the same woman.

“Nicky!” he said, so unsteadily that Elizalde shot him a look of spontaneous concern. “Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith!”

“Shoot,” said Bradshaw. “I’ve known that since 1962.”

“When we were ten? You could have told us!”

“You’d have wanted to go back to her?”

Sullivan remembered the pretty young face looking speculatively out at the old man drowning beyond the waves. “Jesus, no.”

“She killed your father,” said Bradshaw. “Just like she killed me. And now she wants to erase both guilts. Both reproaches, both awarenesses. If we’re gone, see, it can be not true. For her.”

“She; no, he
drowned
, she didn’t
kill
him—”

“She fed you and your sister and your father. Poisoned potato salad. All in the golden afternoon.”

Kootie bounced impatiently down off the couch, and as he began pacing the floor he picked up Sullivan’s pack of Marlboros. Now he shook one out and, with it hanging on his lower lip, slapped his pants pockets. “Somebody got a match?”

“It’s the kid’s lungs!” protested Elizalde.

“One cigarette?” said Kootie’s voice. “I hardly think—It’s all right, Mrs. Elizalde, I’ve smoked Marlboros before. Really? Well, she’s right, you shouldn’t. Don’t let me catch you with one of these in your hand again!” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the pack. “You started it, you were working my hands. Don’t argue with your elders, the lady was right. I was out of line… dammit.” He turned a squinting gaze on Sullivan. “I think your plan will work. It’s better than mine was, in some ways. I like the carborundum bulb to focus just the one signal—it just
might
eliminate the party-line crowd. Let’s get busy.”

Bradshaw volunteered to clear off the top of his desk, and soon Kootie and Sullivan were laying out globes and boxes and wires across the scarred mahogany surface. Bradshaw even dragged a couple of old rotary-dial telephones out of a cupboard for them to cannibalize. Twice Sullivan went out to the van, once for tools and once to disconnect and tote back the battery so as to have some solid 12-volt direct
current and at one point, while he was doing some fast, penciled calculations on the desktop, Elizalde stepped up behind him and briefly squeezed his shoulder. She’d been intermittently busy with something in the little added-on kitchen, and the stale cinnamon air in the office was getting sharp with the steamy fumes of mint and hot tequila.

As his fingers and brain followed the inevitable chessboard logic of potentials and resistances and magnetic fields, Sullivan’s mind was a ringing ground zero after the detonation of his hitherto-entombed memories, with frightened thoughts darting among the raw, broken ruins of his psyche.

I
was there when he drowned! The Christmas shoot in ‘86 was
not
the first time I was ever at Venice Beach
—
no wonder I kept seeing deja-vu sunlit overlays of the Venice scene projected onto those gray winter streets and sidewalks. I had
been there
when he drowned on that summer day in ‘59, and Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith, our stepmother, and she killed him, she poisoned him and watched my father die! I was there
—I
watched my father die! At least Sukie tried to swim out and save him
—
I gave up, ran away, back to the towels.

O car-bolic faithless,
he sang in his head, echoing Sukie’s old misremembered Christmas carol.

He was suddenly sure that Sukie had all along remembered some of that day, possibly a lot of it. Her drinking
C What you can’t remember cant hurt you)
“, her celibacy, and her final feverish attempt to force Pete into bed and have sex with him after he had confronted her with the lies she had told to Judy Nording—even her eventual suicide—must, it seemed to him now as he screwed the Ford coil onto the surface of the desk, have been results of her remembering that day.

By midafternoon the assembly had been wired and screwed down and propped up across the desktop, and the carborundum bulb was plugged in. Edison pointed out that when the evacuated bulb warmed up, the line of its brushy interior discharge would be sensitive to the motion of any person in the room, so they ran wires around the doorway and into Bradshaw’s little fluorescent-lit kitchen, and set up the chalk-cylinder speaker assembly on the counter by the sink, with a rewired old telephone on a TV table in the middle of the floor. Sullivan had ceremoniously slid a kitchen chair up in front of it.

Elizalde had made a steaming, eye-watering tea of mint leaves and tequila in a saucepan on the old white-enameled stove, and had turned off the flame when all the liquid had boiled away and the leaves had cooked nearly dry. She and Johanna were standing by the stove, hemmed in by the wires trailing across the worn linoleum floor.

Elizalde’s eyes were big and empty when she looked up at Sullivan, and he thought he must look the same way. “When you’re ready,” she said, “Johanna and I will go light the candles in the other room, and splash the
vente aquí
oil around. Then we should disconnect any smoke alarms, and I’ll turn on this stove burner again, high, under this pot of
yerra vuena.
You want to be talking into the smoke from it.”

Sullivan had been making sure to take each emptied beer can to the trash before furtively opening the next, so that Elizaide wouldn’t be able to count them.
O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion,
he sang shrilly in his head.

He took the latest beer into the office, which was very dark now that Bradshaw had unplugged the television set and carried it out to one of the garages, and he pried the can open quietly as he checked the discharge in the carborundum bulb. The bulb had indeed warmed up, and the ghostly blue wisp of electrons was curling against the inside of the glass, silently shifting its position as he moved across the carpet.

“I guess we’re ready,” he said, sidling back into the bright lit kitchen past Bradshaw, who was standing in the doorway.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

I
don’t remember the old man’s number,” Bradshaw said. “We could call the reference desk at a library, from a regular phone, I guess.”

“I know the number,” said Sullivan.

Running and running, he thought, running with Sukie since 1959, and then running extra fast and alone since 1986. All over the country. To wind up here, now, in this shabby kitchen, staring at a gutted old black bakelite telephone. “It’s April Fool’s Day, 1898.”

He looked at Elizalde. “My father’s birthday. That and his full name will be his telephone number.” He looked down at the rotary dial on the telephone. The old man would be summoned by dialing April the first, 1898, A-RT-H-U-R—P-A-T-R-I-C-K—S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N.

Slowly, looking at the rotary dial, he read off, “411898, 278487-7287425-78554826.”

“A lot of numbers,” said Kootie, and Sullivan thought it might actually be the boy talking.

“It’s very long distance,” he said.

“I remember I always thought God’s phone number was Et cum spiri 2-2-oh,” said Elizalde nervously. “From the Latin mass, you know?
Et cum spiritu tuo
.”

“You can call Him after I’m done talking to my dad.”

“Can magical calls out of here be traced?” asked Bradshaw suddenly.

Kootie cleared his throat. “Sure,” he said. The boy was sitting up on the kitchen counter beside the chalk cylinder, which had been mounted on the stripped frame of an electric pencil sharpener; he was pale, and his narrow chest was rising and falling visibly. Sweat was running in shiny lines down over his stomach, and the bandage over his ribs on the right side was spotted with fresh blood. “You’ve got—what, three? four?—antennas sitting around in this kitchen, and they do broadcast as well as receive.”

“Don’t worry, Nicky,” said Sullivan, “we’ll use a scrambler. Angelica, could I have Houdini's thumb?” When she had dug the thing out of her shoe and passed it to him, he laid it on the table beside the telephone. “We can dial with this.”

“It would be good if we could make a test call first,” Kootie said thoughtfully. “Anybody got any dead people they got to get a message to?”

Visibly tensing before she moved, Elizalde stepped forward away from the stove, placing her sneakers carefully among the looped wires, and sat down in the chair. “There’s a guy I took money from,” she said steadily, “and I didn’t do the work he paid for.”

Kootie hopped down from the counter. “You know his number?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ll need a lure,” he said, “remember? A ‘homing beacon.’”

She leaned sideways to pull her wallet out of her hip pocket, and then she dug a tattered, folded note out of it. “This is in his handwriting,” she said. “His
emotional
handwriting.” She looked over at Johanna by the stove. “Could you light the candles and…smear the oil over the door lintel, or whatever’s required?”

“Better than you, maybe,” said Johanna with a merry smile.

Elizalde looked at Sullivan. “Drop the dime.”

He was grateful to her for going first. “Okay. Kootie, turn up that fire.”

Sullivan stepped past Bradshaw into the dark office, and while Johanna struck matches to the candles on the shelves and shook out the oil and muttered rhymes under her breath, he dug out of his pocket the magnet they had pulled from the old telephone. He crouched beside the upright Langmuir gauge and waved the magnet past the tiny iron armature, and heard the faint contained
ting
as it rocked against the dangling quartz filament. Then he opened the outside door, sprinted out through the glaring sunlight to the covered van and set the magnet down on the asphalt beside it.