Expiration Date (47 page)

“But there
is
a knife there, too? I need a knife—” I can’t kill the boy with a noisy
gun,
Oaks thought.

“Your knife’s there too. Try to relax, will you? Get in touch with your Inner Child.” The line went dead, and Oaks hung up.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to hear the shrill voices in the exhalation.

Outer child you mean, he thought—it’s the Inner Old Man I want to…get
in touch
with.

In an
Edison
truck! The shudder that accompanied the thought bewildered him.

He bent and with his one hand picked up the cardboard box at his feet, then stepped away from the pay telephone to let one of the impatient crack-cocaine

dealers get to it.

The box rattled in his hand. Tithe, he thought bitterly. It’s like taxing waitresses’ tips—the man taking the cut can be trusted to overestimate the actual take. In the box Oaks had packed ten little glass vials, which was supposed to represent a tenth of the garden-fresh ghosts he would collect during the upcoming month. He had brought it along in advance this way to “show humble.”

He had stuck each vial into a condom. Obstadt had probably never seen the raw product before, and he would doubtless imagine that this eccentric packaging was standard in the trade. Nine of the vials were in Ramses condoms, but one was in a Trojan.

Safe sexorcism. The Trojan hearse. Oaks had no intention of paying any more tithe. If Obstadt was still just a dilettante, well, he could take up an interest in fine wines or something; if by this time he was actually riding piggyback on the Maduro Man, though, he would be in the same jam that Oaks had been in in 1929.

(This morning Oaks had begun to remember events from before 1989; and he had concluded that he was a good deal older than he had thought.)

After hurriedly gathering up the thousand smokes and handing them over to one of Obstadt’s men, and then packing up these ten, he had had only four unlabeled ones left to inhale himself: four miserable, vicious, short-lived gang boys, as luck would have it, the sort of bottled lives he ordinarily disdained as
pieces-a-shit.
They hadn’t done much to hold back the tumultuous army of the Bony Express, clamoring and shouting in Oaks’s head.

In the turbulence, old memories were being shaken free of the riverbed of his mind, and wobbling up to the surface
(like the unsavory old corpse that had bobbed up in the Yarra River in Melbourne in 1910, right after the manacled Harry Houdini had been dropped into the river for one of his celebrated escapes; and it had been a natural, if distasteful, mistake to pounce on the ragged old thing, imagining that it was Houdini freshly dead at last).

He remembered living in Los Angeles in the 1920s, when neon lighting was so new and exotic that its ethereal colored glow was mainly used to decorate innovative churches—the “Mighty I AM” cathedral, and Aimee Semple MacPherson’s giant-flying-saucer-shaped Angelus Temple on Glendale Boulevard. Under some other name, Oaks had been a follower of all kinds of spiritualist leaders, even joining William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi “Legion of Silver Shirts”—though when, as required in the Silver Shirts, he had been asked to give the exact date and time of his birth, he had
given false ones. Actually, he had not known what his real birth date might be; and so, lest he might give the correct date and time unconsciously, he had been careful to give the published birth figures of a randomly chosen movie star.

(It had been Ramon Novarro, and Oaks had occasionally wondered, though never with remorse, if Novarro’s brutal death in the early hours of Halloween, 1969, might have been a long-delayed consequence of that lie.)

And in 1929 he had somehow inhaled a ghost that had been stored in an opaque container; and the stinking lifeless thing had choked his mind, blocked his psychic gullet, rendered him unable to inhale any more ghosts at all. (He thought of the collapsed face he had seen yesterday on the steps down to the parking level at the Music Center up on Temple.)

Oaks knew that he had got past that catastrophe somehow. (A suicide attempt? Something about his missing arm? The memories were like smoke on a breeze.) Some psychic Heimlich maneuver.

The Edison truck had pulled up then, and a man in bright new blue jeans and a Tabasco T-shirt had opened the passenger-side door and hopped down to the pavement.

“Oaks?” he said. When Oaks nodded, he went on, “Here she is. Driver’ll pull into an alley and let the van aboard, and then you got half an hour of drive-around time. More than that, and your monthly rate increases. What’s in the box?”

Oaks held out the cardboard box on the fingertips of his one hand, like a waiter. “Next month’s payment, in advance.”

The man took it. “Okay, thanks—I’ll see he gets it.”

A new Chrysler had pulled in behind the truck, and the man carried the box to it and got in.

Oaks had looked bleakly at the orange and black and yellow truck—Halloween colors!—then sighed and walked around to the back as the Chrysler drove away. When he’d pulled up the sliding back door, he’d been grudgingly pleased to see the things he’d asked for laid out on the aluminum floor: a flashlight, twine and duct tape, and a Buck hunting knife. In the front right corner he could see the gun the driver had apparently insisted on, a shiny short-barreled revolver. Won’t be needing that, Oaks had thought as he’d grabbed the doorframe, put one foot on the bumper, and boosted himself up.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

E
VEN
by straining all his muscles, all together or against one piece of restraining tape at a time, Kootie had failed to break or even stretch his bonds; though he could reach his fingers into the pockets of his jeans.

The flashlight swung wildly as the man climbed over the passenger seat and leaned down over Kootie. He reached out slowly with his one arm, closed his fingers in Kootie’s curly hair, and then lifted the boy back up to a sitting position. Then he sat down on the console, facing Kootie, and stared into the boy’s eyes.

Kootie helplessly stared back. The one-armed man’s round, smooth face was lit from beneath by the flashlight, making a snouty protuberance of his nose, and his tiny eyes gleamed.

“No ectoplasm left, hey?” the man said. “No dog-mannikin today?” He smiled. “Your mouth is taped shut. You’ll be having trouble expiring, just through your nose that way. Here.” He leaned forward, and Kootie wasn’t aware that the man had a knife until he felt the narrow cold back of it slide up over the skin of his jaw and across his cheek almost to his ear, with a sound like a zipper opening.

Kootie blew out through his mouth, and the flap of tape swung away from his mouth like a door. He thought of saying something—
Thank you? What do you want?
—but just breathed deeply through his open mouth.

“My compass needle points north,” the man said. “Your smoke is clathrated. You need to unclamp, open up.”

He lowered his chin, pushing the flashlight to the side, and he held his right hand out so that it was silhouetted against the disk of yellow light high up on the riveted truck wall. Squinting up sideways at the projection, the man wiggled his fingers and said, with playful eagerness, “What would you say to a…
rhinoceros?”
He bunched the fingers then, and said, “Clowns are always a favorite with little boys.” The thumb now made a loop with the forefinger, while the other fingers stuck out. “Do you know what roosters say? They say
cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Kootie realized belatedly that the man was doing some kind of shadow show for him. He blinked in frozen bewilderment.

“Helpful and fun, but not very exciting,” the man concluded, lowering his arm and letting the flashlight swing free so that it underlit his face again. “What could be more
exciting
for a lonely little angel than a flight
up
the hill to where the rich people live? Aboard a charming conveyance indeed! I believe I can provide a snapshot of that.”

He stared into Kootie’s eyes again, and hummed and bobbed his round head until the spectacle of it began to blur from sheer monotony. In spite of his rigid breathlessness, Kootie thought he might go to sleep.

All at once the motion of the truck became jerky and clanging and
upward,
and the seat under him was hard wood. He opened his eyes, and jumped against his restraints.

Cloudy daylight through glass windows lit the interior of a trolley car climbing a steep track up a hill. Kootie’s seat was upright, though, and when he looked around he saw that the trolley car had been
built
for the slope—the floor, seats, and windows were stepped, a sawtooth pattern on the diagonal chassis. A city skyline out of an old black-and-white photograph hung in the sky outside.

There was a little boy wearing shorts and a corduroy cap sitting in the window seat next to Kootie, and he was staring past Kootie at someone across the aisle. Kootie followed the boy’s gaze, and flinched to see the round-faced man sitting there, still wearing stained old bum clothes but with two arms and two hands now.

“Where is the gentleman you boys came with?” he asked.

The boy beside Kootie spoke. “In heaven; send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him i the other place yourself. But, indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”

“Hamlet to Claudius the man said, nodding. “Showing as a youngster, then, eh? Why not?” He smiled at the boy. “What’s the matter, don’t you like my pan?”

“Not much,” the boy said.

The man chuckled. From under his windbreaker he pulled a pencil that was a foot long and as wide around as a sausage, and with his other hand he pulled out a giant pad of ruled white paper. “At the top of the hill I’ll fill out the adoption papers on both you lads,” he said affectionately.

The boy next to Kootie shook his head firmly. “I have a snapshot myself,” he said.

Then the whole length of the cable car fell to level, silently, the front end down and the back end up, though none of the three passengers were jarred at all. It was just that the seats and floor were all lined up horizontally now, like a normal car. The gray sunlight had abruptly faded to darkness outside the windows, and flames had sprung up in little lamps on the paneled walls.

The car was longer and broader now, chugging along across some invisible nighttime plain. The man with the little eyes was sitting several rows ahead now, and he was wearing a ruffled white shut and a gray cutaway coat. In the aisle next to him
stood a tall black man—his clothes were as elegantly cut, but seemed to be made of broad teak-colored leaves stitched together.

From behind Kootie came a boy’s voice: “Newspapers, apples, sandwiches, molasses, peanuts!” Kootie turned around awkwardly in the seat belt that was still taped to his wrists, and saw the boy in the corduroy cap. A big wicker basket was slung over the boy’s arm now, and he was slowly pacing up the length of the car, looking straight at the two men at the far end.

“Where are we?” Kootie whispered when the boy was beside him.

“An hour out of Detroit,” the boy said without looking down, “two hours yet to Port Huron. Sit tight, Kootie. Newspapers, peanuts!” he went on more loudly. There were only the four people in the train car.

The man who now had two arms was staring at the boy. “I
remember
this!” he said softly.
“You
were
him?
Christ, what
year
was this?”

For a moment the boy with the basket paused, and Kootie sensed surprise on his part too. Then, “Apples, sandwiches, newspapers!” he called, resuming his walk up the aisle. The train car smelled of new shoes fresh out of the box.

The man got to his feet, bracing himself on the back of the seat in front of him against the train’s motion. “Well enough, I’ll blow down your straw barricades. Uh…papers?” he said, smiling and holding out his two arms.

The boy lifted out a pile of newspapers and laid them in the man’s hands. The man turned to the open window and tossed the stack out into the windy blackness outside.

When he straightened up, he said, “Pay this boy, Nicotinus.”

The black man handed the boy some coins.

“Magazines,” the man said then. He took the stack of magazines that the boy lifted out of the basket, and threw them too out the window. “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

Kootie sat on his wooden seat, his wrists moored in the stocks of the anachronistic woven-nylon seat belt, and watched as all the wares in the boy’s basket were dealt with in the same way, item by item, sandwich by bag of peanuts.

Through it all the black man was staring intently at the man who kept repeating, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

When the basket was empty, it too went out the window-in exchange for a handful of clinking coins. The boy put his filled hand into his pocket, then took it out and put his fist to his mouth for just a moment, as if eating one of the coins.

For a moment the boy stood empty-handed, facing away from Kootie, while the train rattled through the night and the glassed-in lamp-flames flared. Then he took off his shoes and coat and hat, and, barefoot, lifted them up and laid them in the man’s hands.

The man’s round face smiled, though his tiny eyes didn’t narrow at all. He turned and pitched the clothes out the window, and then he said, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

The boy held out his hand one more time—and the black man seized it and threw the boy to the wooden floor.