Expiration Date (14 page)

A
ND MILES
away to the northwest, out on the dark face of the Pacific, fish were jumping out of the water—mackerel and bonita leaping high in the cold air and slapping back down onto the waves, and sprays of smelt and anchovies bursting up like scattershot; fishermen working the offshore reefs noticed the unusual phenomenon, but being on the surface of the ocean they couldn’t see that the pattern was moving, rolling east across the choppy face of the sea, as if some thing were making
its underwater way toward Venice Beach, and the fish were unwilling to share the water with it.

“J
ESUS
, J
ACKO
did you get beat up again?”

Someone was shaking the boy awake, and for a few moments he thought it was his parents, wanting to know what had happened to the friend he’d been playing with that afternoon. “He was swimming in the creek,” he muttered blurrily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “And he went under the water and just never came up again. I waited and waited, but it was getting dark, so I came home.” He knew that his parents were upset—horrified?—that he had calmly eaten dinner and gone to bed without even bothering to mention the drowning.

He wanted to explain, but…

“Little man, you might be more trouble than you’re worth.”

A dog was licking the boy’s face—and abruptly, as if across a vast gulf, the boy remembered that the dog’s name was Fred; and then he remembered that his own name was Koot Hootie Parganas, not…Al?

His own memories flooded back, reclaiming his mind. He remembered that this was 1992, and that he was eleven years old, and until last night had lived in Beverly Hills—briefly he saw again the one-armed bum in his parents’ living room, and his parents’ blood-streaked bodies taped into chairs—and he knew that he was sitting in the car that belonged to his new friend, Raffle; and finally he remembered that he had opened his parents’ secret glass vial, and had sniffed whatever had been in it right up into his nose.

His forehead was icy with sudden sweat, and he grabbed the handle of the passenger-side window crank, thinking he was about to throw up; then Fred clambered into the back seat, and leaned between the two front seats to lick Kootie’s cheek again. Oddly, that made the boy feel better. He just breathed deeply, and alternately clenched and opened his hands. Whatever had happened to him was slowing down, tapering off.

“I’m okay,” he said carefully. “Nightmare. Hi, Fred.”

“Hello, Kootie,”
said Raffle in a falsetto voice, and after a moment Kootie realized that the man was speaking for the dog. “Fred don’t know to call you Jacko,” explained Raffle in his own voice.

The boy managed a fragile smile.

Memories from a past life? he wondered. Visions? Maybe there was LSD in that vial!

But these were just forlorn, wishful notions. He knew with intimate immediacy what had happened.

He had inhaled some kind of ghost, the ghost of an old man who had lived a long time ago, and Kootie had briefly lost his own consciousness in the sudden onslaught
of all the piled-up memories as the old man’s whole life had flashed before Kootie’s eyes. Kootie had not ever watched a playmate drown—that had been one of the earliest of the old man’s memories.

A shout of “Gee-haw!” and the snap of a whip as the driver kept the six-horse team moving, tugging a barge along the Milan canal, and the warm summer breeze up from the busy canal basin reeked of tanning hides and fresh-brewing beer…

Kootie forced the vision down. Milan was the name of a place in Italy, but this had been in…Ohio?

and a caravan of covered wagons, which he knew were about to head west, to find gold in California…

Kootie coughed harshly, spraying blood onto the dashboard.

“Oh, dammit, Jacko. You sick? I don’t need a sick kid…”

“No,” said Kootie, suddenly afraid that the man might order him out of the car right here. “I’m fine.” He leaned forward and swiped at the blood, drops with his sleeve. “Like I said, it was just a nightmare.” He closed his eyes carefully, but the intrusive memories seemed to have trickled to a stop. Only the last few, the chronologically earliest ones, had hit him slowly enough to be comprehensible. “Are we gonna do some more business tonight?”

After a few moments Raffle gave him a doubtful smile. “Well, okay, yeah, I believe we will. After dark, and until ten o’clock, at least, a homeless dad-and-son tableau has gotta be worth booyah, out west of the 405 where the guilty rich folks live. You want to eat?”

Kootie realized that in fact he was very hungry. “Oh, yes, please,” he said.

“Great.” Rattle got out of the car, walked around to the front and lifted the hood. “I trust you like Mexican cuisine,” he called.

“Love it!” Kootie called back, hoping nothing was wrong with the car. His parents had often taken him to Mexican restaurants, though of course they had made sure he ordered only vegetarian things like chiles rellenos, not cooked in lard. He was picturing bowls of corn chips and chunky red salsa on a table, and he wanted to get there very soon.

Now Raffle was coming back and getting inside, but he had not closed the hood, and he was carrying a foil-wrapped package which, Kootie realized when the man sat down and began gingerly unwrapping it, was hot and smelled like chili and cilantro.

“Burritos,” Raffle said. “I buy these cold in the morning and drive around all day with ’em wedged in between the manifold and the carb. Plenty hot by dinnertime.”

Newspapers from underfoot turned out to be informal place mats, and silverware was a couple of plastic forks from the console tray; unlike Raffle’s “pipes,” the forks had obviously not ever been considered disposable.

Kootie made himself stop imagining a hot plate with a couple of enchiladas swimming in red sauce and melted cheese. This burrito was hot, at least; and the spices nearly concealed the faint taste of motor oil and exhaust fumes.

He wondered if the ghostly intruder in his head was aware of the events happening out here in Kootie’s world; and for just a moment he had the impression of…of someone profoundly horrified in a long-feared hell. Kootie found himself picturing walking quickly past a cemetery at night, and being afraid to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and, somehow, sitting crouched on the cowcatcher of an old locomotive racing through a cold night.

Kootie shuddered, and after that he just concentrated on the burrito, and on thwarting the dog’s cheerful interest in the food, and on the shadows on the dark street outside the car windows.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I
N
Wilmington the glow of dawn was held back by the yellow flares of the Naval Fuel Reserve burn, huge flames gouting out of towering pipes at the top of a futuristic structure of white metal scaffolding and glaring sodium-vapor lights; below it and inland, on the residential streets around Avalon and B Street, shaggy palm trees screened the old Spanish-style houses from some of the all-night glare.

Pete Sullivan tilted a pan of boiling water over his McDonald’s cup and watched the instant-coffee crystals foam brown when the water hit them. When the cup was nearly full he put the pan back on the tiny propane stove and turned off the burner.

As he sipped the coffee, he switched off the overhead light and then pulled back the curtain and looked out through the vans side window at this Los Angeles morning.

The money-scapular was pasted to his sweaty chest, for he hadn’t known this area well enough to sleep comfortably with a window open.

Last night he had driven aimlessly south from his early-evening nap stop at La Cienega Park, and only after he’d found himself getting off the 405 at Long Beach Boulevard did he consciously realize that he must have come down here to look at the
Queen Mary.

To put that off, he had resolved to have something good for dinner first, and then had been shocked to find that the Joe Jost’s bar and restaurant on Third Street was gone. He’d made do with a pitcher of beer and a cold ham sandwich at some pizza parlor, disconsolately thinking of the Polish sausage sandwiches and the pickled eggs and the pretzels-with-peppers that Joe Jost’s used to have.

At last he had got back into the van and driven down Magnolia all the way to the empty south end of Queen’s Highway and stopped in the left lane, by the chain-link fence; he had slapped his shirt pocket to be sure he still had the dried thumb in the
Bull Durham sack, and then he’d got out and stood on the cooling asphalt and stared through the fence, across the nearly empty parking lot, at the
Queen Mary.

Her three canted stacks, vividly red in the floodlights, had stood up behind and above the trees and the fake-Tudor spires of the “Londontowne” shopping area, and he had wondered if Loretta deLarava was at home in her castle tonight.

The breeze had been cold out in the dark by the far fence, but he had been glad of his distance and anonymity—even if deLarava had been standing out on the high port docking wing and looking out this way, she couldn’t have sensed him, not with the thumb in his pocket and the plaster hands in the van right behind him. Houdini’s mask was only in effect draped around him right now; he wasn’t really wearing it, wasn’t a decoy-Houdini as the wearer of the mask was intended to be; but even so the mask would blur his psychic silhouette, fragment it like an image in a shattered mirror.

You’ve hurt my family enough
, he had thought at her.
Fully, fully enough. Let us rest in peace.

The beer had made him sleepy, and, after eventually getting back in the van, he had driven only a little distance west, across the Cerritos Channel and up Henry Ford Avenue to Alameda, which was called B Street down here in lower Wilmington, before pulling over to a curb and turning the engine off and locking up.

T
HE RATTLING
roar of a low helicopter swept past overhead now, and for an instant he glimpsed the vertical white beam of a searchlight sweeping across the yards and rooftops and alleys. Somewhere nearby a rooster crowed hoarsely, and was echoed by another one farther away.

Sullivan wondered if Los Angeles had ever been really synchronized with the time and space and
scale
of the real world. Even finding a men’s room, he remembered now as he sipped this first cup of coffee, had often been an adventure. Once in a Chinese restaurant he had trudged down a straight and very long flight of stairs to get to one, and then discovered that a number of doors led out of the tiny, white-tiled subterranean room—he had made sure to remember which doorway he had come in through, so that he wouldn’t leave by the wrong one and wind up in some unknown restaurant or bakery or laundry, blocks from where he had started; and one time in a crowded little low-ceilinged Mexican restaurant on Sixth he had pushed his way through the
REST ROOMS
door to find himself in a cavernous dark warehouse or something, as big as an airplane hangar, empty except for a collection of old earthmoving tractors in the middle distance—looking behind him he had seen that the restaurant was just a plywood box, attached to the street-side wall, inside the inexplicably enormous room. His Spanish had not been good enough to frame a question about it, and Sukie had been irritably drunk, and when he’d gone back a month or so later the place had been closed.