Expiration Date (32 page)

A cellular telephone was wedged under his jaw, and in his right hand he held a Druid Circle oatmeal cookie from Trader Joe’s. “You don’t need to be fretting about overcosts, Loretta,” he said absently into the phone. “Your location accountant’s an anal-retentive, and the production reports always balance. You’ve got the insurance and permissions. Worry about something else, if you’ve got to worry.”

Obstadt had had various business dealings with deLarava for years, and he knew that this anxiety was what she called “checking the gates”—a cameraman’s term for a last-minute, finicky checking of the lens for dust or hair. Still, he could hear her sniffling—and she’d been crying on the phone this morning, too—and it occurred to him that this agitation was out of proportion for the modest ghosts-on-the-Queen-
Mary
shoot she had scheduled for Saturday.

“You having a bad hair day, Loretta?” he asked. “Your big manhunt suffer a setback?” The light turned green, and he accelerated west, toward the elevated arch of the 405.

“What did you have to do with that?”
shrilled her voice out of the phone. “He isn’t
really
leaving the state,
is
he?”

Obstadt blinked, and smiled as he took a bite of the cookie. “Who, Topper?” he said around the mouthful. “Spooky, I mean—your Nicky Bradshaw. He left the state? I had nothing to do with it, I swear. I never even liked the show.”

“Oh,
Bradshaw
,” she said, her quick anger deflating. “My…
manhunts
are doing just fine, thank you. I’ve got one snatch working right now that’s going to be costing me
twenty grand.”

“Good for you, kid, the big time at last.” Obstadt glanced at the taped-shut Marlboro carton on the seat beside him. Twenty grand for a washed-up old prehistoric
fish?
he thought. Or did you give up on the fish?
I’m
spending
forty
grand to finance a snatch, buy the access to somebody else’s snatch—but forty grand for a thousand primo smokes is the bargain of a lifetime. Jeez, though, cash!—in a cigarette carton that I’ve got to hand to some guy from the phone exchange, just for rerouting their reward listing of that missing Sockit Hoomie boy! The exchange people are reliable, but who, really, is this Sherman Oaks person? His
ass
’ll be smoke, if he hoses me on this. “So who is it that slipped through your fingers tonight?” Obstadt said into the phone.

“If everybody minded their own business,” sniffed deLarava, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

Obstadt suspected that her line was a quote from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books. Loretta liked old smokes that had hung around hotel lobbies for decades; Obstadt preferred them fresh. It was the old ones that quoted Alice all the time. Among the solid old bum-smokes on the street, the Alice stuff seemed almost to be scripture.

He was driving between the broad dark lawns of the Veterans Administration grounds now, with the Federal Building to his left and the cemetery to his right.

“Is it that fish?” he asked, taking another bite of the cookie. “Did you get outbid by the fish-market man at Canter’s?” So much for your bid to be the Fisher Queen, he thought—in spite of all your vegetarianism, and your “youth treatments,” and your Velcro instead of buttons and topologically compromising buttonholes.

“What are you eating?” deLarava demanded. “Don’t speak while you’re chewing, you’re getting crumbs in my ear.”

“Through the
phone?
I doubt it, Loretta.” Obstadt was laughing, and in fact spraying crumbs onto his lap. “It’s probably dead fleas. Don’t you wear a flea collar under your hair?”

“Jesus, it’s sand! Grains of sand! Has he been whispering to me while I napped? But I’ll eat him—”

The line clicked. She had hung up.

He replaced the phone in the console cradle, and his smile unkinked as he drove under the freeway overpass, the cemetery behind him now. You spend all day at the beach, Loretta, he thought, you shouldn’t be surprised to find sand in your ear.

Loretta was crazy, beyond any doubt. But—

Something big had happened two nights ago, at around sundown; he had had to excuse himself from dinner at Rusty’s Hacienda in Glendale and go stand on the sidewalk and just breathe deeply and stare at the pavement, for all the ghosts he’d snorted up over the years were clamoring so riotously in his mind that he couldn’t hear anything else; the Santa Ana wind had strewn the lanes of Western Avenue with palm fronds, and Obstadt had squinted almost fearfully southwest, over the dark hills of Griffith Park, wondering who it was that had so abruptly arrived on the west coast psychscape.

The intensity had faded—but now the street-smokes were all jabbering and eating dirt, and some kind of dinosaur had washed up in Venice, and deLarava couldn’t stop crying.

Loretta’s a down
, he had said this morning.
She wins chips in this low-level game, hut never cashes ’em in to move up to a bigger table; still, some big chips do sometimes slide across her table; and she’s all excited about one now.

He stomped the gas pedal furiously to the floor, and bared his teeth at the sudden roar of the engine as acceleration weighted him back against the seat.

The fish? he thought; some Jonah
inside
the fish? The guy that maybe left the state? Nicky Bradshaw?

Who?

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

A
ND
way out east at the other end of Wilshire, out where multicolored plastic pennants fluttered along nylon lines strung above used-car lots, where old brownstone apartment buildings still stood on the small grassy hills, their lower walls blazing even in the failing daylight with bright Mexican murals, where neglected laundry flapped on clotheslines in the grassless courtyards of faded apartment complexes built in the 1960s, Kootie stepped up a curb, limped across the sidewalk away from the red glow of a Miller Beer sign in a corner bar window; and rocked to a halt against the bar’s gritty stucco wall.

He was still intermittently talking to himself, and during the walking of these last several blocks he had even begun moving his lips and whispering the dialogue.

“I cant walk anymore,”‘ he panted. “I think I’ve ruined my foot—they’re probably gonna have to just cut it off and put a wooden one on,”

“Duh,” he said thickly then, speaking for the absent ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, which he was certain he had left behind in a mess on the stairs at the Music Center, “well, I got wooden teeth. No, that was George Washington—well, I got a wooden head.”

“I
saw
your head,” Kootie whispered, his voice shaky even now as he remembered that shocking period of dislocation. “It was made out of old strips of beef fat.” He mouthed the last two words with, it fleetingly occurred to him, as much revulsion as his vegetarian parents would have done. He jumped hastily to the next thought: “I’m gonna go in this bar—no, not to get a
cocktail
, you stupid old
fart!
—I’m gonna get somebody to call the cops for me.”

Kootie was still holding the quarter that the pay telephone had given back to him two hours ago. He had been gripping it between his first two fingers and tapping it against the palm of his hand as he had walked. The rhythm of the tapping had been unconsidered and irregular, but now, probably because he had a purpose for the coin again, the tapping was forcefully repetitive.

“I don’ wanna go in the bar,” he said in his dopy-old-Edison voice, and in fact Kootie didn’t want to step in there. The memory was still too fresh of the lunatic
phone call with—with what, exactly? The ghosts of his parents? It had been that, or it had been a hallucination. And his parents had seemed to be in a bar.

But if somebody
else
made the telephone call…

(He found himself picturing carbon;
black grains in a tiny cell at first, with a soft iron diaphragm that would alternately compress and release the carbon grains, thus changing their conductivity; but the grains tended to
pack,
so that after a while the conductivity was stuck at one level…)

If somebody else made the call it might go through, and not just be routed again to that bar from hell.

That call an hour ago had
started
to get through—Kootie was sure now that the first voice he had heard had really been the 911 operator, for after he had walked away from the pay phone he had seen a police car drive past slowly in the right-hand eastbound lane of what had proved to be Sixth Street. Kootie had wanted to go flag him down, but had found himself hurrying away across the parking lot instead, and pushing open the glass door of a ninety-nine-cent store, where he had then gone to the back aisle and crouched behind a shelf of candles in tall glasses with decals of saints stuck on the outsides.

He must have been afraid, still, of facing the police and deciding which sort of crazy story to tell them.

And then the shop manager had yelled at him, demanded to know what the boy was doing there, and in his feverish embarrassment Kootie had bought a bagful of stuff he hadn’t wanted, just to placate the man: a box of Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, a blister-pack roll of 35-millimeter film, and a Hershey bar with almonds. They were all things displayed right at the checkout counter. The bag was crumpled up now, jammed inside his lightweight shirt.

When he had finally left the store and resumed limping east, away from the fading light, he had pretended that the imaginary ghost of Edison took the blame for Kootie having hidden from the police car.
Duh, sorry
, he had had the ghost say,
but I can’t let the cops catch me—I’ve got library books that have been overdue since 1931!

Now Kootie forced himself to push away from the wall and walk toward the bar’s front door. He was chilly in the smoky evening breeze with just the polo shirt on, and he hoped the bar’s interior would be warm.

(A glass lamp-chimney, blackened with smoke. When the black stuff, which was carbon, was scraped off, it could be pressed into the shape of a little button, and that button could be attached to the metal disk. In another room you could bite the instrument it was connected to, and, through your teeth and the bones of your skull,, hear the clearer, louder tones.)

Kootie pulled open the door with his left hand, for the fingers of his right were still rapidly thumping the quarter into the tight skin of his palm.
Tap…tap…tap…tap-tap-tap…tap…tap…tap…

An outward-bursting pressure of warm air ruffled his curly hair—stale air, scented with beer and cigarette smoke and sweaty shirts, and shaking with recorded
mariachi guitar and the click and rattle of pool balls breaking across bald green felt. Yellow light shone in the linoleum under his Reeboks’ soles as he shuffled to the nearest of the two empty barstools. The bartender was squinting impassively down at him over a bushy mustache.

“Do you have a telephone?” Kootie asked, grateful that his voice was steady. “I’d like to have someone make a call for me.”

The man just stared. The men on the barstools around him were probably staring too, but Kootie was afraid to look any of them in the face. They’ll recognize me from those billboards, he thought, and turn me in. But isn’t that what I want?

“
Teléfono
,” he said, and in desperate pantomime he raised his left hand in front of his chin as if holding an empty Coke bottle to blow hoots on, while he held his right hand up beside his head, the fingers extended toward his ear. “Hel-
lo
?” he said, speaking into the space above his left hand. “Hel-
lo
-o?”

His left hand was still twitching with the coin, and belatedly he realized that the rhythm it had been beating against his palm was the Morse code for SOS; and at the same time he noticed that he was miming using one of those old candlestick-and-hook telephones, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

SOS?
he thought to himself—and then, instinctively and inward, he thought:
What is it, what’s wrong?

An instant later he had to grab the padded vinyl seat of the barstool to keep from falling over.

Kootie’s mouth opened, and for several whole seconds a series of wordless but conversational-tone cat warbles yowled and yipped out of his throat; finally, after his forehead was hot and wet with the effort of resisting it and he had inadvertently blown his nose on his chin, he just stopped fighting the phenomenon and let his whole chest and face relax into passivity.

“
Duh
,” came his voice then, clear at last. “Du-u-h,” it said again, prolonging the syllable, indignantly
quoting
it. Then he was looking up at the bartender. “Thanks, boys,” said Kootie’s voice, “but never mind. All a mistake, sorry to have wasted your time. Here, have a round of beers on me.” After a pause, Kootie’s voice went on, “Kid, put some money on the bar.”

Catching on that he was being addressed—by his own throat!—Kootie hastily dug into the pocket of his jeans and, without taking out his roll of bills, peeled one off and pulled it out. It was a five; probably not enough for very many beers, but the next bill might be a twenty. He reached up and laid it on the surface of the bar, then ducked his head and wiped his chin on his shoulder.

“Lord, boy, a fiver?” said his mouth. “I bet they don’t get many orangutans in here. Who are these fellas, anyway, son? Mexicans? Tell ’em in Mexican that this was a misunderstanding, and we’re leaving.”

“Uhhh,” said Kootie, testing his own control of his voice.
“Lo siento, pew no yo soy aqui. Eso dinero es para cervezas. Salud. Y ahora, adios.”

“Oh,” he heard himself add, “and get matches, will you?”

“Uh,
y para mi, fosforos, por favor? Mechas? Como para cigarros?”

After another long several seconds, the bartender reached out and pushed a book of matches forward to the edge of the bar.