Expiration Date (2 page)

T
ERMIMATOR 2.
“Peewee’s Playhouse.” Mario Brothers and Tetris on the Nintendo. Big acs and the occasional furtive Marlboro. College, eventually, and maybe even just fnishing high school. Astronomy.
Friends
. All that, on the one hand.

Rajma, khatte chhole, masoor dal, moong dal, chana dal
, which were all just different kinds of cooked beans. On the other hand. Along with Mahatmas, and start some kind of new theosophical order (instead of go to college), and don’t have a girlfriend.

As if he ever could.

You think it’s bad that Melvin touched you and gave you his cooties?
We’ve
got a Kootie in our
class.

H
IS JAW
was clenched so tight that his teeth ached, and tears were being squeezed out of his closed eyes, but he lifted the Dante over his head with both hands—paused—and then smashed it down onto the hearth.

With a muffled
crack
it broke into a hundred powdery white pieces, some tumbling away onto the tan carpet.

He opened his eyes, and for several seconds while his heart pounded and he didn’t breathe, he just stared down at the scattered floury rubble. At last he let himself exhale, and he slowly stretched out his hand.

At first glance the mess seemed to consist entirely of angular lumps of plaster; but when he tremblingly brushed through the litter, he found a brick-shaped piece, about the size of two decks of cards glued together front-to-back. He picked it up—it was heavy, and its surface
gave
a little when he squeezed it, cracking the clinging plaster and exhaling a puff of fine white dust.

He glanced over his shoulder at the front door, and tried to imagine what his parents would do if they were to walk in right now, and see this. They might very well, he thought, go completely insane.

Hastily he started tugging at the stiffly flexible stuff that encased the object; when he got a corner unfolded and was able to see the inner surface of the covering he realized that it was some sort of patterned silk handkerchief, stiffened by the plaster.

Once he’d got the corner loose, it was easy—in two seconds he had peeled the white-crusted cloth away, and was holding up a little glass brick. The surfaces of it were rippled but gleamingly smooth, and its translucent depths were as cloudy as smoky quartz.

He held it up to the light from the window—

And the air seemed to vibrate, as if a huge gong had been struck in the sky and was ringing, and shaking the earth, with some subsonic note too profoundly low to be sensed by living ears.

A
LL DAY
the hot Santa Ana winds had been combing the dry grasses down the slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains, moving west like an airy tide across the miles-separated semi-desert towns of Fontana and Upland, over the San Jose Hills and into the Los Angeles basin, where they swept the smog blanket out to sea and let the
inhabitants see the peaks of Mount Wilson and Mount Baldy, hallucinatorily clear against a startlingly blue sky.

Palm trees bowed and nodded over old residential streets and threw down dry fronds to bounce dustily off of parked cars; and red-brick roof tiles, loosened by the summer’s rains and sun, skittered free of ancient cement moorings, cartwheeled over rain gutters, and shattered on driveways that were, as often as not, two weathered lines of concrete with a strip of grass growing between. The steady background bump-and-hiss of the wind was punctuated by the hoarse shouts of crows trying to fly, upwind.

Downtown, in the streets around the East L.A. Interchange where the northbound 5 breaks apart into the Golden State and Santa Monica and Hollywood Freeways, the hot wind had all day long been shaking the big slow RTD buses on their shocks as they groaned along the sun-softened asphalt, and the usual reeks of diesel smoke and ozone and the faint strawberry-sweetness of garbage were today replaced with the incongruous spice of faraway sage and baked Mojave stone.

For just a moment now as the sun was setting, redly silhouetting trees and oil tanks on the western hills around Santa Monica, a higher-than-usual number of cars swerved in their freeway lanes, or jumped downtown curbs to collide with light poles or newspaper stands, or rolled forward at stoplights to clank against the bumpers of the cars ahead; and many of the homeless people in East L.A. and Florence and Inglewood cowered behind their shopping carts and shouted about Jesus or the FBI or the Devil or unfathomable personal deities; and for a few moments up on Mulholland Drive all the westbound cars drifted right and then left and then right again, as if the drivers were all rocking to the same song on the radio.

I
N AN
alley behind a ramshackle apartment building down in Long Beach, a fat shirtless old man shivered suddenly and dropped the handle of the battered dolly he had been angling toward an open garage, and the refrigerator he’d been carting slammed to the pavement, pinning his foot; his gasping shouts and curses brought a heavyset young woman running, and after she’d helped him hike the refrigerator off of his foot, he demanded breathlessly that she run upstairs and draw a bath for him, a
cold
one.

A
ND ON
Broadway the neon signs were coming on and darkening the sky—the names of the shops were often Japanese or Korean, though the rest of the lettering was generally in Spanish—and many of the people in the hurrying crowds below glanced uneasily at the starless heavens. On the sidewalk under the marquee of the old Million Dollar Theater a man in a ragged nylon jacket and baggy camouflage
pants had clenched his teeth against a scream and was now leaning against one of the old ornate lampposts.

His left arm, which had been cold all day despite the hot air that was dewing his forehead with sweat, was warm now, and, of its own volition was pointing west. With his grubby right hand he pushed back the bill of his baseball cap, and he squinted in that direction, at the close wall of the theater, as if he might be able to see through it and for miles beyond the bricks of it, out past Hollywood, toward Beverly Hills, looking for—

—An abruptly arrived thing, a new and godalmighty smoke, a switched-on beacon somewhere out toward where the sun had just set.

“Get a life,” he whispered to himself. “God,
get
a life!”

He pushed himself away from the pole. Walking through the crowd was awkward with his arm stuck straight out, though the people he passed didn’t give him a glance, and when he got on an RTD bus at Third Street he had to shuffle down the crowded aisle sideways.

A
ND FOR
most of the night all the crickets were silent in the dark yards and in the hallways of empty office buildings and in the curbside grasses, as if the same quiet footstep had startled all of them.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

K
OOTIE
trudged back up the quiet dimness of Loma Vista Drive toward home. He was walking more slowly than he had been a few minutes ago on Sunset Boulevard, and now that he had got his breath back he realized that he was limping, and that his side hurt worse than ever. Probably that punch in the stomach had cracked a rib.

Tomorrow must be trash day—all the wheeled green plastic trash cans were out along the curbs. His neighbors’ houses, which he had always scornfully thought looked like 1950s-style Japanese restaurants, were hidden behind the trees, but he knew that behind the ARMED RESPONSE signs on the lawns they were probably all dark at this hour. He was sure that dawn couldn’t be far off.

He leaned against one of the trash cans and tried to ignore the hard pounding of his heart and the tight chill in his belly that was making his hands sweat and shake. He could claim that burglars had got in, and kidnapped him because he had seen them, because he was a
witness
who could identify them in a
lineup
; they had panicked, say, and grabbed him and fled after doing nothing more than break the Dante. Kootie had managed to escape…after a fight, which would be how come his left eye was swelling shut and his rib was perhaps broken.

He tried to believe the burglar story, which he would probably have to tell to some policeman—he tried to imagine the fictitious burglars, what they had said, what their car had looked like; and after a few moments he was horrified to realize that the tone of the whole thing just rang with kid-ingenuity, like the “concerto” he had composed on the piano a year ago, which had sounded every bit as good and dramatic as Tchaikovsky to him at the time, but later was somehow just meandering and emphatic.

A kid just couldn’t see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something; or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

A grown-up would probably have been able to tell that Lumpy and Daryl weren’t nice guys.
Well, shit, Koot my man, you can stay in my garage—it’s right
down here, nothing fancy but it’s got a bed and a refrigerator—and you can work for me detailing cars.