Expiration Date (67 page)

“Uh,” said Elizalde hesitantly, “I think the car’s on fire.”

Smoke was trickling, then billowing, from the slots on the top of the dashboard. “Shit,” said Sullivan—he snatched the cigarette lighter out of its slot, and blinked for a moment at the flaming, gummy wad on the end of it; then he gripped the wheel with his free fingers while he cranked down the driver’s-side window with his left hand, and he pitched the burning thing out onto the street: “That
was
the cigarette lighter, wasn’t it?” he asked angrily.

Elizalde bent over to look at the still-smoking ring in the dashboard. “Yes,” she said. “No—it’s a cigar lighter. Wait a minute—altogether it says,
L.A.CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL
. What the hell does that mean?”

Sullivan waved caramel-reeking smoke away from his face, and he was remembering the tin ashtray that had briefly burst into flame at Los Tres Jesuses on Wednesday morning. “Let’s remember to ask Nicky.”

“Freeway coming up,” said Elizalde.

A
ND SO
, thought Nicholas Bradshaw as he tucked the still-clean knife back in the kitchen drawer, I don’t get the renewal, I don’t get a rebirth. I have heard the candy-colored clowns they call the sandmen singing each to each—I do not think that they will sing to me.

Cinnamon tears were still running down his slack cheeks, and his hands were still trembling, but, when he had plodded back into the office, he crouched and picked up Kootie’s limp, breathing body and straightened up again with no sense of effort. He even stood on his bad right ankle long enough to hook the outside door open with the left, and felt no twinge of pain.

Shutting down, he thought.

The boy whined in his sleep as the chilly evening air ruffled his sweat-damp hair. Every step Bradshaw took across the shadowed asphalt seemed to be the snap of a television being turned off, the slam of a door in an emptied building, the thump of a yellowed copy of
Spooked
being tossed out of a vacated apartment onto a ruptured vinyl beanbag chair in an alley. I am unmaking myself, he thought. I am looking at a menu and pointing past the flowing script on the vellum page, past the margin and the deckle edge, right off the cover of the menu, at, finally, the crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray.

“I believe I feel like Death Warmed Over this evening,” he said out loud.

Aside from a remote sadness that was almost nostalgia, he had no feelings about his decision not to kill Kootie and inhale the Edison ghost: not guilt at having considered doing it, nor satisfaction at having decided not to. He had held the knife beside the boy’s ear for several minutes, knowing that he could hide the body in one of the several freezers in the garages, and that Pete Sullivah and the Angelica woman would believe him when he told them that the boy must have run away; knowing too that he would be able thereafter to sleep again, and dream.

Had it been the thought of the sort of dreams he might have had, that had made him finally pull back the knife? He didn’t think so. Even if the dreams had proved to be uniformly horrible—of the day he learned of his stepfather’s death, for example, or the summer-of-’75 week he had spent drunk and freshly dead inside the refrigerator on the Alaskan trawler in the Downtown Long Beach Marina, or whatever detail-memories the murdering of Kootie would have given him—he still thought he could have
lived
with them.

In the end he just hadn’t been able to justify extending the mile-markers of his personal highway by reducing this living boy to one of them.

At the apartment door now, he set the boy upright against the wall, and held him in place with one hand while he opened the door with the other. Then he got his arms under the boy’s arms and knees again and carried him inside.

Bradshaw knelt to lay Kootie on the floor where he had been napping earlier. The boy began snoring, and Bradshaw got to his feet and left the apartment, being sure that the door was locked behind him.

Back in his office he sat down on the couch without bothering to turn on any lights. The desk was bare—the components of the telephone had been disassembled and laid in a cardboard box, and Bradshaw had not brought the television set back in. His charred pigs, relieved of their malignant batteries, lay in a heap in the corner. Distantly he wondered if he would ever again marshal his warning systems.

He reached around behind the arm of the couch and pulled free the broom, then clutched the straw end and boomed the top of the stick twice against the ceiling.

Tomorrow, he thought, I’d like to drive to the Hollywood Cemetery myself, and lie down on one of those green slopes and just sleep. But I’ve been dead for seventeen years—God knows how bad it might be. The explosion might knock half the mausoleums off their foundations.

He heard Johanna’s door slam upstairs, and then in the quiet night he could hear the faint ringing of the metal stairs. There was silence when she had got down to the asphalt, and then came a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said. “It’s not locked.”

Johanna pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Not by accident?” she said in a concerned voice. “Always you lock it. And won’t you get your pigs and TV back up?”

“I don’t think, so,” he said. Sweetie-pie.” He inhaled, and then made words of the sigh: “Bring me a can of snuff, would you please?
(Gasp)
And then sit here by me.”

The couch shifted when she sat down. “And no lights,” she said.

“No.” He took the snuff can from her extended hand and twisted the lid. “Tomorrow is Halloween,” he said. “All these things we’ve had up through this night—will be broken up and lost. Like a rung bell finally stopping ringing—but. When dawn comes. Find it a sweet day, Johanna. Find it a blessed day. Live in the living world. While it lasts for you. I hope it may see you happy, and not hungry. Not hurt, not crying. Every one of me will be watching over you. To help, with all of whatever I’m worth then.”

He tapped a little pile of snuff out onto his knuckle and sniffed it up his nose. Almost he thought he could smell it.

Johanna had tucked her head under his jaw, and her shoulders were shaking. “It’s all right if I cry now,” she whispered.

He tossed the little can out onto the dark rug and draped his arm around her. “For a while,” he said.

After a time he heard the crunch of the Nova’s tires on the broken pavement outside, and he kissed her and stood up. He knew it must have got cold outside by now, and he went to the closet to put on a shirt.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

I
N
spite of their muddy clothes, Sullivan and Elizalde had stopped to buy a couple of pizzas and a package of paper plates and an armload of Coke and Coors six-packs, and when they had turned on the chandelier light in the apartment living room Sullivan carried the supplies to the open kitchen. He was glad of the heat being on so high in the apartment. “Wake up Kootie,” he called, “he’ll want some of this.”

Elizalde crouched over the boy and shook him, then looked up blankly. “He’s passed out drunk, Pete. Tequila, by the smell.”

Sullivan had unzipped his sodden leather jacket, and now paused before trying to pull his hands through the clinging sleeves. How did he—? Could he be a drunk already, at his age?”

“I suppose. Did you bring the bottle back here?”

“No, didn’t think of it.” He worked his arms free and tossed the jacket into a corner, where it landed heavily.

They had left the front door open, and now Nicky Bradshaw spoke from the doorstep. “I gave it to him,” he said “He was Edison. We were talking, and he said he could have a couple.”

Elizalde stood up, obviously furious. “That’s…
criminal!
“ she said. “Edison should have had more sense. He’s
in loco parentis
here—I wonder if he let his own kids drink hard liquor.” She squinted at Bradshaw. “You should have known better too.”

“I wasn’t watching him pour,” Bradshaw said. “Can I come in?”
“Nicky!”
buzzed the gnat in Sullivan’s ear, and then it was gone. “Yeah, come in,” Sullivan said. “Where’s Johanna?”

“She’s fixing her makeup.” Bradshaw stepped ponderously in, creaking the floorboards. “Did you find—” His hand jerked up toward his head, then stopped, and suddenly his weathered face tensed and his eyes widened. “Uncle Art!” he said softly.

Sullivan looked down at Elizalde, who was still crouched over Kootie. “My father flew over to him,” he explained. “How is Kootie?”

“I think he’s waking up. You’ve got instant coffee in your van? Could you go

get it?”

“Sure.” She had carried in Houdini’s hands and laid them by the door, and he hefted one up as he stepped outside, but though the night breeze chilled him in his damp clothes he didn’t feel peril in it, here. He walked shivering across the lot to the van and lifted the parachute to get at the side doors with his key; in the total darkness inside, he groped like a blind man, finding the coffee jar and a spoon and a couple of cups by touch, with Houdini’s hand tucked under his arm.

Before he climbed down out of the van, he stood beside the bed and sniffed the stale air. He could smell cigarette smoke, and the faintly vanilla aroma of pulp paperback books, and the machine-oil smells of the .45 and the electrical equipment he had bought today. It occurred to him that it was unlikely that the van would ever be driven again, and he wondered how long this frail olfactory diary would last. On the way out he carefully pulled the doors closed before lifting the parachute curtain to step away from the van.

Kootie was awake and grumbling when Sullivan got back inside, and Bradshaw was sitting against the wall in the corner, muttering and laughing softly through pink tears. Sullivan pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, but didn’t go over to where Bradshaw and his father were talking, instead striding on to the kitchen. Elizalde stood up from beside Kootie to help Sullivan unpack the supplies.

They took turns washing their hands in the sink, then opened the pizza boxes. “Edison says he doesn’t want any,” Elizalde said as she lifted a hot slice of pepperoni-and-onion pizza onto a paper plate, “but I think he will when he sees it.”

Sullivan had measured a spoonful of powdered coffee into one of the cups, and now he turned to frown at the water he had left running in the sink. “I wonder if this is even connected to a hot pipe,” he said, putting a finger into the cold stream from

the tap.

“You could always make it from the back of the toilet,” she said. “That’s plenty

hot. And it’s what Edison deserves.”

“Kootie
is
still in there?” Sullivan asked quietly.

“Yes. It was him that first woke up. Edison’s planning to ‘go into the sea’ tomorrow, and I think it’s doing Kootie good to have him run things in the meantime, so Kootie can get a lot of sleep.”

“You’re the doctor.” The water was still running cold, so Sullivan put down the coffee cup, jacked a Coors out of one of the six-pack cartons, and popped the tab on top. “Do you figure you’ve laid Frank Rocha?” He stepped back before her sudden hot
glare. “What I mean is, you know, is the ghost laid. Is he R.I.P. now? Can we just… buy some kind of old car and leave California?”

“You and me and Kootie?”

“Kootie? Is he part of the family?”

“Are we a family?” Her brown eyes were wide and serious.

Sullivan looked away, down at the pizza. He lifted another triangle of it onto a paper plate. “I meant partnership. Is he part of the partnership?”

“Is your father?”

“Jesus, is this what you psychiatrists
do?
Take the night off, will you?” He looked across the room just as Johanna stepped up to the front door. “Here, Johanna, you want a piece of pizza?”

“And a beer, please,” she said, walking in. Her blue eye shadow looked freshly applied, but her eyes were red, and she was wearing a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe.

Sullivan pushed the paper plate across the counter to her and opened her a beer. He didn’t want to talk to Elizalde; he was uncomfortable to realize that he had meant the double entendre about laying Frank Rocha, though he had acted surprised and innocent when she had glared at him. Was he jealous of her? He knew he was jealous of Bradshaw’s easy conversation over in the corner with his father, though he didn’t want to take Bradshaw’s place.

Then abruptly his ear tickled, and his father’s tiny voice said,
“Nicky’s got to go to some other building here. Let’s you and me walk along. Your girl can talk to Nicky’s girl”

My
girl
, thought Sullivan. “That’s not how it is,” he said. He was sweating in spite of his clinging, wet clothes—for his father would want to talk seriously now—and he picked up the can of Coors.