Expiration Date (50 page)

Sullivan had carried the plaster hands inside, and he laid them against the door as though they were holding it closed.

“This is your safe place?” Elizalde’s voice echoed in the empty room. She twisted the rod on the Venetian blinds over the window until the slats were vertical, then walked to the far wall and ran her long fingers over a patched section where Shadroe had apparently once filled in a doorway. “What makes it safe?”

“The landlord’s dead.” Sullivan leaned against another wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor. “He walks around and talks, and he’s in his original body and he’s not…you know,
retarded
—he’s not a ghost, it’s still his actual
self
inside the head he carries around. I believe he’s been dead for quite a while, and therefore he must know it, and be taking steps to keep from departing this…”

“Vale of tears.”

“To use the technical term,” Sullivan agreed. “The place must be a terrible patch of static, psychically. The reason I think he’s aware of his situation is that he’s made it a terrible patch physically, too, a confusing ground-grid. All the original doors and windows seem to have been rearranged, and you can see from outside that the wiring is something out of Rube Goldberg. I can’t wait to start plugging things in.”

“Running water can be a betrayer too.”

“And he’s messed that up. I noticed earlier today that the toilet’s hooked up to the
hot
water. I could probably make coffee in the tank of it.”

“And have steamed buns in the morning,” she said.

Her smile was slight, but it softened the lean plane of her jaw and warmed her haunted dark eyes.

“Hot cross buns,” added Sullivan lamely. “Speaking of which, do you want to order a pizza or something?”

“You don’t seem to have a phone,” she said, nodding toward an empty jack box at the base of one wall. “And I don’t think we should leave this…compound again tonight. Do you have anything to eat in your van?”

“Makings of a sandwich or two,” he said. “Canned soup. A bag of M&M’s.”

“I’ve missed California cuisine,” she said.

“You were out of town, I gather,” he said cautiously.

“Oklahoma most recently. I took a Greyhound bus back here, got in late Tuesday night. Drove through the Mojave Desert. Did you ever notice that there are a lot of
ranches,
out in the middle of the desert?”

“I wonder what they raise.”

“Rocks, probably.” She leaned against the wall across from him. “‘Look out, those big rocks can be mean.’ And on cold nights they put gravel in incubators. And, ‘Damn! Last night a fox got in and carried off a bunch of our fattest rocks!’”

“‘Early frost’ll kill all these nice quartzes.’”

She actually laughed, two contralto syllables. “Don’t get excited now,” she said, “but your dead man’s got the heat turned all the way up in here, and not a thermostat in sight.” She unzipped the front of her jumpsuit and pulled down the shoulders, revealing a wrinkled Graceland sweatshirt; and when she pulled the jumpsuit down over her hips and sat down to bunch it down to her ankles, he saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans.

She began untying the laces of her sneakers, and Sullivan made himself look away from her long legs in the tight denim.

“I hope you don’t trust everybody,” he said.

Out of the top of her right sneaker she pulled a little leather cylinder with a white plastic nozzle at the top. It had a key ring at the base of it, and with the ring around her first finger she opened her hand to show it to him. “CN mace,” she said with a chillier smile. “In case the soup is bland. I don’t trust anybody…very far.”

Sullivan discarded the idea of taking offense. “Good.” He straightened his legs out across the floor and hooked a finger through the loop at the corner of the fanny pack that was hanging on his left hip; then, not knowing whether he was being honest with her or showing off, he pulled on the loop—the zippers whirred open as the front of the canvas pack pulled away, exposing the grip of the .45 under the Velcro cross-straps.

Her face was blank, but she echoed, “Good.”

She had taken her shoes and socks off and pulled the jumpsuit free of her ankles and tossed it aside. She stretched her legs, wiggling her toes in the air.

“But,” Sullivan went on. He unsnapped the belt and pulled it from around his waist, and then slid the fanny pack across the floor toward the door. “I’ve decided to trust
you”

She stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, but then she spun the leather-sleeved cylinder away. It bumped the heavy pack six feet away from where she sat, and she said softly, “All right. Are we partners, then? Do we shake on it?”

On his hands and knees he crossed the floor to her. They shook hands, and he crawled back to his wall and sat down again.

“Partners,” he said.

“What do you know about ghosts?”

To business, he thought. “People eat them,” he began at random. “They can be drawn out of walls or beds or empty air, made detectable, by playing period music and setting out props like movie posters; when they’re excited that way, magnetic compasses will point to ’em, and the air around tends to get cold because they’ve assumed the energy out of it. They like candy and liquor, though they can’t digest
either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dry twigs and rocks. They—”

“Produce from the Mojave ranches.”

“Amber fields of stone,” he agreed. “They’re frail little wasps of smoke when they’re new, or if they’ve been secluded and undisturbed. Unaroused, unexcited. The way you eat them is to inhale them. But if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff, physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit and what have you—”

“What have
you,”
she said, politely but with a shudder, “I
insist”

“—and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes, and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor. They don’t have new thoughts, and tend to go on and on about old grievances. A lot of the street lunatics you see—maybe most of ’em—are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that. I worked for a woman who stayed young by finding and eating ghosts that had been preserved in the frail state, in old libraries and hotels and restaurants. She lives on water, aboard the
Queen Mary
—”

“I just heard about her! And she drowned her husband in the sea.”

Sullivan crawled across the floor again and picked up Elizalde’s beer. “I never heard of her having a husband. May I?”

Elizalde had one eyebrow cocked. “Help yourself, partner. I just wanted a sip to cut the dust.”

Sullivan took a deep swallow of the chilly beer. Then he sat down next to her, setting the can down on the floor between them.

“What do you know about séances?” he asked breathlessly. “Summoning specific ghosts?”

She picked up the can and finished the beer before answering him. “I know a turkey can hurt you if he hits you with a wing—you’ve got to have ‘em bagged up tight in a guinea sack. Excuse me. With ghosts, you’d be smart to have some restraints in place, before you call them. They do come when you call, sometimes. Séances are dangerous—sometimes one of them is for real.” She yawned, with another shudder at the end of it, and then she glanced at the two white hands braced against the door. Sullivan was thinking of the ghosts they’d seen in the parking lot a few minutes ago, and he guessed that she was too. “I’m not hungry,” she said in a low voice.

He knew what she was thinking:
Let’s not open the door.
“Me either,” he said.

“You’ve got your leather jacket for a pillow, and I can ball up my jumpsuit. Let’s go to sleep, and discuss this stuff when the sun’s up, hmm? We can even…leave the light on.”

“Okay.” He stood up and took off the jacket, but then crouched and folded it on the floor just a couple of feet from her, and stretched himself out parallel to the wall.

She had leaned toward the window to pick up the jumpsuit, and then she stared at him for several seconds. The gun and the mace spray were islands out in the middle of the floor.

At last she sighed and stretched out beside him, frowning uncertainly as she set the empty beer can on the floor between them. “You…read the whole interview?” she said as she slowly lowered her head to the bunched-up jumpsuit. She was looking away from him, facing the wall. “The interview of me, in
L.A. Weekly!”

Sullivan remembered reading, I’ve
reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m
not
Catholic, I
don’t
drink, and I
don’t
seem to be attracted much to men.

And he remembered Judy Nording, and Sukie, and his sonnet that had wound up so publicly in the trash. I suppose I’ve reacted too, he thought. “Yes,” he said gently.

As he closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep, he thought: Still, Doctor, you did try a couple of sips of beer.

—Thomas Alva Edison,
Scientific American,
October 30, 1920

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

K
OOTIE
woke up when a black man nudged his foot with a bristly push broom. The boy straightened up stiffly in the orange plastic chair and blinked around at the silent chrome banks of clothes dryers, and he realized that he and the black man were the only people in the laundromat now. Whenever he had blinked out of his fitful naps during the long night, there had been at least a couple of women with sleepy children wearily clanking the change machine and loading bright-colored clothing into the washing machines in the fluorescent white glare, but they had all gone home. The parking lot out beyond the window wall was gray with morning-light now, and apparently today’s customers had not yet marshaled their laundry.

“My mom will be back soon,” Kootie said automatically, “she had to go back home for the bedspreads.” He had said this many times during the night, when someone would shake him awake to ask him if he was okay, and they had always nodded and gone back to folding their clothes into their plastic baskets.

But it didn’t work this morning. “I should charge you rent,” said the black man gently. “Sun’s up, boy.”

Kootie slid down out of the seat and pulled his new sunglasses out of his jacket pocket. “Sorry, mister.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about some chalk drawings somebody did on the outside of the building, would you?”

Kootie put on the sunglasses before he looked up at the man. “No.”

The man stared at him for a moment, then crinkled his eyes in what might have been a smile. “Oh well. At least it wasn’t gang-marks from our Kompton Tray-Fifty-Seven Budlong Baby Dipshits or whoever they are today. And at least it was just chalk.”

Kootie’s head was stuffed and throbbing. “Are the chalk markings still there?”

“I hosed ’em off just now.” Again he gave Kootie the wry near-smile. “Figured I’d let you know.”

Kootie started to stretch, but he hitched and pulled his right arm back when the cut over his rib flared hotly in protest. “Okay, thanks.”

He limped across the white linoleum, around the wheeled hanger-carts, to the glass doors, and as soon as he had pushed them open and stepped outside, he missed the stale detergent-scented air of the laundromat, for the dawn breeze was chilly, and harsh with the damp old-coins smell of sticky trash-can bottoms.

A half-pint bottle of 151-proof Bacardi rum had cost him sixteen dollars yesterday afternoon—six for the bottle, and a ten-dollar fee for the woman who had gone in and bought it for him. By her gangly coltish figure Kootie had judged her to be only a few years older than himself, but her tanned face, under the lipstick and eyeliner and flatteringly acnelike sores, had been as seamed and lined as a patch of sunbaked mud. Edison had made Kootie tear the ten-dollar bill jaggedly into two pieces before giving one half of it to the woman prior to the purchase; he had laughingly said that this made her his indentured servant, but neither Kootie nor the woman had understood him. He had wordlessly given her the other half of the bill after she had delivered the bottle.

Edison had already had Kootie buy a roll of adhesive tape and a box each of butterfly bandages and “Sterile Non-Stick Pads,” and then in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight behind a hedge on a side street off Vermont, Edison had pulled up Kootie’s shirt to look at their wound, which had still been perceptibly leaking blood even though Kootie had been keeping his fist or his elbow pressed against it almost without a break since he had got away from the Southern California Edison truck half an hour earlier.

It was a V-shaped cut too big for him to be able to cover with his thumb, and Kootie had begun whimpering as soon as Edison started swabbing at it with a rum-soaked pad, so Edison had made Kootie swallow a mouthful of the rum. The taste was surprising—like what Kootie would have expected from film developer or antifreeze—but it did make his head seem to swell up and buzz, and it distracted him from the pain as Edison thoroughly cleaned the cut and then dried the edges, pulled them together, and fastened them shut with the I-shaped butterfly bandages.