Expiration Date (29 page)

Kootie had stopped being angry at Raffle, and was instead panicked and dismayed at having lost the only person in Los Angeles, in the
world
, who’d cared to help him. Kootie was certain that if he hadn’t been such a stupid
kid
, he could somehow
have talked Raffle out of turning him in, and they could right now have been driving to get Raffle’s dope somewhere, happy in the car, with Fred licking their faces. Kootie winced as he stepped down off a high curb, and he wondered what Fred was doing now; probably right this minute Fred was sharing Kootie’s own personal heated-up tamale with Raffle in some safe parking lot.

Kootie’s pelvis and right hip ached, as if he’d recently tried doing one of those Russian crouch-and-kick dances and then finished with a full butt-to-the-floor split—but he was trying not to think about it, for the mysterious muscle strain was a result of whatever had gone on during the time he had been blacked out at the Music Center, when the ghost of the old man had been in control of his body.

God only knew what the old man had done. Fallen awkwardly? Karate-kicked somebody? Kootie would have expected more dignity from
Thomas Alva Edison.

There it was, he had thought about it. The ghost had been
Edison
—as in the SCE logo, painted on the doors of the Halloween-colored black-and-orange trucks, Southern California Edison—the guy that invented the lightbulb. Kootie’s parents had always told him not to play with lightbulbs, that there was a poisonous “noble gas” in them; in school he had found out that they’d been thinking of neon lights, and that neon wasn’t poisonous anyway. But there had been a poison in the glass brick hidden in the Dante statue, for sure.

Noble gas my ass, he thought defiantly as he blinked away tears. You old…
shithead!
What were you doing in that test tube inside the glass brick anyway?

Duh
, he thought, replying for the absent Edison,
I dunno.

You got my mom and dad killed! And now everybody wants to kill me too.

Duh. Sorry.

Moron.

Kootie remembered the face on the top of the bloody framework he had pulled off of himself, but a shudder torqued through him, almost making him miss his footing on the cracked sidewalk. It was apparently far too soon to think about that episode, and he found that he had focused his eyes on the stucco walls, bright orange even in the shadow of the clouds, of a ninety-nine cent store on the corner ahead of him. Two pay telephones were perched under metal hoods on a post by the parking-lot curb.

Al
, he thought nervously, quoting the old woman who had moaned to him out of the pay-phone receiver on Fairfax this morning,
where am I gonna meet you tonight?

Al. Alva. Thomas Alva Edison. And in the hallucination he’d had—

Again he shied away from the memory of being dislocated out of his own body—but he was sure that it had been the Edison ghost that the old woman had been trying to talk to. She had known the name—the nickname!—of the ghost Kootie had been carrying around. To the people who live in the magical alleys of the world, Kootie thought, that ghost must have been sticking out like a sore thumb.

But the ghost was gone now! Kootie had left it torn and deflated on the steps at the—

Involuntarily he exhaled, hard enough to have blown out a whole birthday-cake-full of candles, if one had been here. (Raffle had told him that in these neighborhoods they generally hung paper-skinned figures from trees on kids’ birthdays, and then beat the things with sticks until they split apart, at which point the kids would scramble for the little cellophane-wrapped, hard candies that spilled onto the dirt from the broken paper abdomens.)

The ghost was gone now, that was the important thing. Maybe telephones would work, for .Kootie, now.

He flexed the fingers of his right hand and slowly reached down and dug in his jeans pocket for a quarter. Who would he call?

The police, for sure.

Kootie’s teeth were cold, and he realized that he was smiling. He would call the police, and the one-armed bum wouldn’t follow him anymore, not after the bum stumbled across the—

After the bum came to the end of the ghost’s trail.

And then Kootie would be put in…
some
kind of home, finally, with showers and bathrooms and beds and food. Eventually he’d be adopted, by some family. He’d be able to see any movies he wanted to see….

His teeth were still cold, but he was sobbing now, to his own horror and astonishment. I want my
own
family, he thought, I want my own house and my own mom and dad. Maybe they aren’t dead—
(in those bloody chairs)
—of course they aren’t dead, they were standing in the living room in formal clothes
(ignoring me in such, a scary way)
and probably they’re the ones that hired the billboards and posted the reward!

He needed to know, he needed to throw himself somewhere
now
, and he ran to the telephones even though the pain of running wrung whimpers through his clenched teeth.

When he had rolled the quarter into the slot, he punched in 911.

After two rings, a woman’s voice said, calmly, “Nine-one-one operator, is this an emergency?”

“I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Kootie quickly. “My parents were—were robbed and beaten up, real bad, night before last, and there’s billboards with my picture on ’em, and a reward—” Kootie was suddenly dizzy, and he actually had to clutch the receiver tightly to keep from falling. He swung around on the pivot of his good heel until his shoulder hit the phone’s aluminum cowl. When he had straightened up he had a quick impression that someone was behind him, wanting to use the phone, but he looked around and saw no one near him. “—A reward,” he went on, “that’s being offered for me. My mom and dad live on Loma Vista Street in Beverly Hills and there was—”

A man’s voice interrupted him. “Parganas?” the man said alertly.

“Yes.”

“Just a sec. Hey,” the man said away from the phone, “it’s the Parganas kid!” More loudly, he added, “It’s Koot Hoomie!”

The phone at the other end was put down with a clunk on something hard. In the background Kootie could hear a lot of people talking, and a clatter like a cafeteria. He heard glass break, and a voice mumble “Fuck.”

There was a rattling on the line as someone picked up the distant phone. “Koot Hoomie?”

It was his mother’s voice! She
was
alive! He was sobbing again, but he managed to say, clearly,
“Mom, come and get me.”

There was a moment of relative silence, broken only by mumbling and clattering at the other end; then, “Kethoomba!” his mother exclaimed. (Was she drunk? Was everybody
drinking
there in the dispatcher’s office?) Kootie remembered that Kethoomba was the Tibetan pronunciation of the name of the mahatma his parents had named him after. She had never called Kootie that. “Gelugpa,” she went on, “yellow-hatted monk! Come and get me!”

“Gimme that phone,” said someone in the background. “Master!” came the quavering voice of Kootie’s father. “We’ll be out front!” Quietly, as if speaking off to the side of the receiver, Kootie’s father asked someone, “Where are we?”

“
Fock
you,” came a thick-voiced reply.

“Dad,” shouted Kootie. “It’s me, Kootie! I need you to come get me! I’m at—” He poked his head out into the breeze and tried to see a street sign. He couldn’t see one up or down the gray street. They trace these calls, ask the dispatcher where I’m calling from. Have ‘em send a cop car here quick.”

“Don’t go outside!” called his father to someone in the noisy room. “Cop cars!” Then, breathily, back into the mouthpiece:
“Kootie?”

“
Yes
, Dad! Are you all drunk? Listen—”

“No, you listen, young man. You
broke the Dante
—don’ interrupt—you broke the, the Dante, let the light shine out before anything was prepared—well, it’s your
son
, if you mus’ know—”

Then Kootie’s mother was on the line again. “Kootie! Put the master back on!”

Kootie was crying harder now. Something was terribly wrong. “There’s nobody here but me, Mom. What’s the matter with you? I’m lost, and that guy—there’s bad guys following me—”

“We need the master to pick ‘s up!” his mother interrupted, her voice slurred but loud. “Put ’im on!”

“He’s not here!” wailed Kootie; his ear was wet with wind-driven tears or sweat, and chilly because he was now holding the phone several inches away from his head. “I called.
My
name is Koot Hoomie, remember? I’m
alone!”

“You killed us!” his mother yelled. “You broke the Dante, you couldn’t wait, and then the…
forces of darkness
!… found us, and killed us! I’m
dead
, your fathers dead, because you disobeyed us! And now the master hasn’t called! You’re
bad
, Kootie, you’re
ba-a-ad.”

“She’s right, son,” interjected Kootie’s father. “Iss your fault we’re dead and Kethoomba’s off somewhere. Get over here
now.”

Kootie couldn’t imagine the room his parents were in—it sounded like some kind of bar—but he was suddenly certain of what they were wearing. The same formal wedding clothes.

In the background there, a little girl was reciting a poem about how some flower beds were too soft…and then a hoarse woman’s voice said, “Tell him to put Al on, will ya?”

Kootie hung up the phone. The wind was colder on this street now, and the sky’s gray glow, made opaque smoke of the windshields on the passing cars.

His quarter clattered into the coin-return slot. Apparently there was no charge on 911 calls.

A
ND TEN
blocks east of Kootie, leaning against bamboo-pattern wallpaper at the back of a steamy Thai takeout restaurant, Sherman Oaks pressed another pay-telephone receiver to his ear.

At the other end of the line, a man answered, recited the number Oaks had called, and said, “What category?”

“I don’t know,” said Oaks, “Missing Persons? It’s about that kid, Koot Hoomie Parganas, the one on the billboards.”

“Koot Hoomie sightings, eh?” Oaks could hear the rippling clicking of a computer keyboard. “You speak English,” the operator noted.

The remark irritated Oaks. Probably he had always spoken English. “‘Most people don’t?”

“Been getting a lot of Kootie calls from illegal immigrants:
‘Tengo el nino, pew no estoy en el pais legalimente.’
Got the kid, but got no green card. Looking for a second party to pick up the reward. There must be fifty curly-haired stray kids locked in garages in L.A. right now. One of ’em might even be the right one, though he hasn’t been turned in yet, or this category would be closed out. Okay, what? You’ve got him, you know where he is? We’ve got a bonded outfit checking all reasonable claims, and a representative can be anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area within ten minutes.”

“What I’ve got,” Oaks said, “is a counter-offer.” He looked around at the other people in the tiny white-lit restaurant—they all seemed to be occupied with their takeout bags and cardboard cartons, and even the obtrusive smells of cilantro and chili peppers seemed to combine with the staccato voices and the sizzle of beef and shrimp on the griddle to provide a screen of privacy for the phone. “You know smoke? Cigar? The Maduro Man?”

“It’s a different category, but I can call it up.”

“Well, I can put up—” Oaks paused to pull his attention away from the bright agitation of the restaurant, and he ran a mental inventory of the three major caches
he kept, hidden out there in corners of the dark city; he pictured the dusty boxes of empty-looking but tightly sealed jars and bottles and old crack vials—he even had a matched pair, an elderly matrimonial suicide pact, locked up in the two snap-lid receptacles of a clear plastic contact-lens case. “I can put up
a thousand doses
of L.A. cigar, in exchange for the kid. Even wholesale that’s a lot more than twenty grand.”

He heard more keyboard clicking. “Yeah, it is.” The man sighed. “Well, for that we’d need a guarantor, somebody we’ve got listed, who can put up forty grand. Counter-offers have to be double, house policy. If we get that, we’ll go ahead and list it under the Parganas heading. But the guarantor would have to do all the other work, like maybe putting a trap on the reward-number phone and being ready to intercept anybody who, you know, might already have the kid and be trying to get the original reward. I don’t have to tell you that hours count in this one. Minutes, even.”

“I know.”

Oaks looked down at the compass in the pommel of his knife—right now it was pointing up in the direction of Dodger Stadium, which was plain old north, but a few minutes ago it had joggled wildly and then, for what must have been nearly a full minute, pointed emphatically west. After that it had wobbled back to north, and he hadn’t seen it deviate from that normal reading since.

During it all, he had felt no heat in his absent arm—but the compass had clearly registered a brief re-emergence of the big ghost; and the ghost had been in the excited state, too, for ghosts didn’t cast the huge magnetic fields when they were in their normal quiescent ground state. It
was
clathrated in the boy’s psyche, and not dissipated or eaten. Oaks was achingly anxious to get off the phone and resume his jogging pursuit—westward!—but this insurance was worth a minute’s delay.