Expiration Date (23 page)

The light changed, and they crossed Temple, Fred tugging eagerly at the leash in Raffle’s knobby fist.

“So we don’t do any actual
work
at all,” Kootie said, relieved in spite of himself.

“Work is whatever you do that gets you a nice time, Jacko,” Raffle said, and you gotta figure out how to get the most for the least. Food, shelter, drink, dope. Some guys take a lot of R and R in jail, they don’t mind those orange jumpsuits, but that ain’t for me—my outstanding warrants are under different names, every one. In jail,
speaking of your video rewinder, they start the movies at eight, but bedtime is nine, so you always miss the end of the movie. Could you live like that? And if you even smoke a cigarette—and one cigarette, in trade, costs you anywhere from four to eight items from the commissary, like soap or candy bars—a guy hiding in the air-conditioning vent or somewhere tells on you, and then on the loudspeaker, “Mayo, report to the front watch, and put out that cigarette.’ You get a write-up, and gotta spend four hours scrubbing the toilets or something. Get two or three write-ups and you get a major—you don’t get your early release date. The
good
life is this out here.*’

Kootie shrugged bewilderedly. “I’m sold,” he said.

They were stopped now at the Hope Street corner curb, waiting for the east-west light to change, and several men in suits and a woman in a coffee-colored dress had drifted up beside them, chattering about whoever was singing the Phantom role today.

The words
I’m sold
went on ringing in Kootie’s head as he stared to his right, back north across Temple.

The sky and the houses on the Echo Park hills and the greenery of the Hollywood Freeway shoulder all faded into a blurry two-dimensional frame surrounding the white, white billboard with the black lettering and the livid color photograph.

Kootie was icy cold inside his heavy flannel shirt. His ears were ringing as if with the explosions of the dreamed firecrackers, and he wondered if he would be able to run, able to work his muscles at all. It had not occurred to him that there might be more than one of the billboards—this affront had the disorienting dreamlike intrusiveness of supernatural pursuit.

The billboard was in English here, three blocks north of the first one:

CASH REWARD FOR THIS MISSING BOY:
NAMED KOOT HOOMIE
LAST SEEN MONDAY, OCTOBER THE 26TH,
ON SUNSET BOULEVARD
$20,000 CALL (213) JKL-KOOT $20,000
NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Kootie swung his head around to blink up at Raffle.

Raffle was staring at the billboard, and now looked down at Kootie with no expression on his weathered brown face.

The little green figure was glowing now in the screened box below the traffic signal across Hope, and the people beside Kootie stepped out into the crosswalk. Kootie found himself following them, staring at the crude silhouette in the box and hearing Raffle’s step and Fred’s jangling chain coming right along behind him.

“You’d get eight thousand,” said Raffle quietly “After my cut and Fred’s.”

“Damn Ford,” said Kootie helplessly.

“We can get a Cadillac,” said Raffle. “Hell, we can get a Winnebago with two bathrooms.”

“I can’t…go to them,” Kootie said, involuntarily.
Why not?
he asked himself—I surely can’t live in a damn
car
forever. Then he heard himself saying, “They’ll eat me and kill you.”

Kootie stepped up the curb, helplessly letting the theater goers hurry on ahead, and turned to face Raffle.

Raffle was frowning in puzzlement. “
Eat
you?” he said. “And kill
me?”

“Not you,” Kootie said, speaking voluntarily now. “He was talking to me—he meant kill
me.”

“That’s what he meant, huh?” Now Raffle was grinning and nodding. “
I
get it, Jacko—you really
are
crazy. Your nice clothes and nice manners—you’re the escaped schizo kid of some rich people, and they want you back so you can take your Thorazine or lithium, right? I’ll be
rescuing
you.”

Kootie, entirely himself for the moment, stared at the man and wondered how fit Raffle was. “I can just run, here.” His heart was thumping in his chest.

“You got a bad ankle. I’d catch you.”

“I’ll say I don’t know you, you’re trying to molest me.”

“I’ll point at the billboard.”

Kootie looked past Raffle at the momentarily empty sidewalk and street. “Let’s let these cops decide.”

When Raffle turned around, Kootie hopped up the stairs and broke into a sprint across the broad flat acropolis-like plaza, toward the curved brown wall below the flared white turret of the Mark Taper Forum; a walkway crossed the shallow pool around the building, and he focused on that. The tall glass facade of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was too far away.

Behind him he heard a yelp as Raffle collided with Fred, and then he heard the big man’s shoes scuffling up the steps; but Kootie was running full tilt, ignoring for now the pounding blaze of pain in his ankle, and when he crossed the moat and skidded around the circular brown wall of the Mark Taper Forum he couldn’t hear his pursuers.

Then he could. Fred’s claws were clattering on the smooth concrete and Raffle’s shoes were slapping closer. Kootie was more hopping than running now, and his face was icy with sweat—in a moment they’d catch him, and there was no one around who would help, everybody would want a piece of the $20,000.

Caught
. Jagged memories crashed in on him—whipping his horse as he drove home at night past a cemetery while unsold newspapers tumbled in the back of the cart as insubstantial fingers plucked at the pages; crashing through the dark woods at Port Huron, pursued by the ghost of a recently dead steamship captain; fleeing west to California under the “mask” of a total eclipse of the sun in 1878, leaving no trail, sitting uncomfortably on a cushion on the cowcatcher of the racing Union Pacific
locomotive, day after day, as it crested the mounting slopes toward the snowy peaks of the Sierras…

And too he remembered
expiring
in the bedroom of the mansion in Llewellyn Park in October of 1931, breathing out his last breath—into a glass test tube.

Anyone could eat him now, inhale him,
inspire
the essence of him. In his tiny glass confinement he had been taken to Detroit, and then eventually back out to California, and this prepubescent boy had inhaled him; the boy wasn’t mature enough to
digest
him, unmake him and violate him and put his disassembled pieces to use for alien goals…but the people pursuing him
could
, and
would.

If they caught him.

At this moment the boy was just a shoved-aside passenger in his young body, and the old man turned on the dog that came bounding around the curve of white wall.

N
O MORE
than
two
other people at the
worst
, thought Raffle, at the
very
worst, and that’ll still leave sixty-six hundred for me, since dumb Jacko is forfeiting his share, making me run after him like this; I can knock him down and then start yelling
Rightful Glory Mayo! Rightful Glory Mayo!
—no, no jail names here, use the real name—what the hell
is
the real name?—and then tell ’em to call 911, this kid’s having a prophylactic fit, swallowing his tongue. I can take off my shoe and stick it in the kid’s mouth so he can’t talk, say it’s a first-aid measure.

Raffle sprinted across the walkway over the shallow pool and skidded around the curved wall of the Mark Taper only a few seconds after Kootie had, and practically on Fred’s tail just as a deep
thump
buffeted the morning air.

And he clopped to a frozen halt, slapping the wall to push himself back.

The wall was wet with spattered blood that was still hot, and through a fine, turbulent crimson spray he stared at the portly old man, dressed in a black coat and battered black hat, who was gaping at him wide-eyed. Thinking
gunshot
, Raffle glanced down for Kootie’s body, but saw instead the exploded, bloody dog-skeleton of Fred.

Kootie was nowhere to be seen.

The old man half turned away, and then suddenly, whirled and sprang at Raffle, whipping up one long leg and punching him hard in the ear with the toe of a hairy black shoe; the impact rocked Raffle’s head, and he scuffled dizzily back a couple of steps, catching himself on the pool railing.

The old man’s mouth sprang open, and though more blood spilled out between the uneven teeth, he was able to say, “
Let’s see you capture me now, you sons of bitches
”

Raffle remembered the boy having said something like Kill
you and eat me
, and for this one twanging, stretched-out second Raffle was able to believe that this old man had
eaten
Kootie, and was now ready to kill him, ready to blow him up the way he’d apparently blown up the dog.

And an instant later Raffle had leaped the railing and was running away, splashing through the shallow pool, back toward the steps and the car and the smoggy familiar anonymity of the scratch-and-scuffle life south of the 10 Freeway.

T
HE FIGURE
of the old man walked unsteadily to the stairs on the west side of the elevated plaza. A few of the people in line for Phantom tickets nudged their companions and stared curiously at the shapeless black hat, and at the black coat, which was coming apart at the shoulders as the arms swung at the figure’s sides.

The well-dressed people in line had seen the boy run that way, pursued by the bum, and they’d seen the bum come running back, across the pool and right on past to the stairs, in a fright; but this old man was walking calmly enough, and there hadn’t been any screams or cries for help. And the old man was disappearing down the parking garage stairs now, at a slow, labored pace. Clearly whatever had happened was over now.

T
HE OLD
man had thrown Kootie right out of his own body, into a pitch dark room that Kootie somehow knew was “Room 5 in the laboratory at West Orange.”

The boy was panting quickly and shallowly, with a whimper at the top of each expiration. He wasn’t thinking anything at all, and he could feel a tugging in his eyes as his pupils dilated frantically in the blackness.

As he slowly moved across the wooden floor, sliding his bare feet gently, he passed through static memories that were strung through the stale air like spiderwebs.

There was another boy in this room—no, just the faded ghost of a boy, a five-year-old, who dimly saw this dark room as the bottom of a dark creek in Milan, Ohio. He had drowned a very long time ago, in 1852, while he and his friend Al had been swimming. In the terror of being under the water and unable to get back up to the surface, in the terror of actually sucking water into his lungs, he had jumped—right out of his body!—and clung to his friend on the bank above. And he had gone on clinging to his friend for years, while Al had done things and moved around and eventually grown up into an adult.

Kootie shuffled forward, out of the standing wave that was the boy’s ghost, and he was aware of Al himself now, who as a boy had simply walked home after his friend had disappeared under the water and not come back up; Al had had dinner with his mother and father and eventually gone to bed, without remarking on the incident at the creek—and he had been bewildered when his parents had shaken him awake hours later, demanding to know where he had last seen his friend. Everyone in town, apparently, was out with torches, searching for the boy. Al had patiently explained what had happened at the creek…and had been further bewildered by the horror in the faces of his mother and father; by their shocked incredulity
that he would just walk away from his drowning friend.