Expiration Date (68 page)

“Your sister went on to drink a lot, didn’t she?”

Sullivan paused, with the beer halfway to his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

“I could tell. Do you know why I came back, out of the sea? There goes Nicky, follow him.”

Bradshaw was at the open doorway. “Nick,” said Sullivan, putting down the beer and stepping past Elizalde out of the kitchen area. “Wait up, I’ll—we’ll—walk you there. “

“Thank you, Pete,” said Bradshaw. “I’d like that.”

Bradshaw began clumping heavily across the dark lot toward the office, and Sullivan walked alongside, his hands in his pockets. “Nick,” he said. “What does. ‘L.A. cigar—too tragical’ mean?”

“Damn it,” said Bradshaw in his flat voice. “Did you burn up the car?” He stepped up to his office door and pushed it open.

“No, but I threw your cigarette lighter out onto Santa Monica Boulevard.” Sullivan followed him inside to the kitchen, where Bradshaw opened a cupboard to pry a finely painted china plate out of a dusty stack.

“It’s a…mercy thing,” said Bradshaw, not looking at him. “That some people do. It’s a hippodrome, where it reads the same forwards as backwards. I don’t know who
started it, or even who else does it. But you write it around…(
gasp
)…ashtrays, and lighters, and chimneys. I’ve seen little shops on Rosecrans, where you. Can buy frying pans with it written. Around the edge.” He had opened a drawer and lifted out a handful of shiny pebbles. “The hippodrome words attract new ghosts. They hang around—trying to figure it out how the end can be the same as the beginning. And then when the fire comes. They get burned up.” He spread the pebbles on the china plate, and then carried it back out through the dark office and right outside to the parking lot.

“Beasties!” he called in a harsh whisper. “Din-din, beasties!” He put the plate down on the pavement. “It’s a mercy thing,” he said again. “They’re better off burned up and gone. If they hang around, they’re likely to get caught by people like Loretta deLarava. That’s Kelley Keith, Uncle Art, what she calls herself now. Caught, and digested, to fatten the parasite’s bloated, pirated personality. And if they
don’t
get caught by somebody…”

He stepped back, almost into the doorway of the office, and Sullivan joined him in the shadows.

From around behind an upright old car hood on the other side of the yard, a lumpy figure came tottering uncertainly into the glow of the parking-lot light. It was wearing a tan trench coat over its head, with apparently a broad-brimmed hat under that to hold the drapery of the coat out to the sides like a beekeeper’s veil. Its groping hands looked like multi-lobed sweet potatoes.

And from the overgrown chain-link fence on the other side of the lot came a rattling and scuffling, and Sullivan saw more shapes rocking forward out of the darkness.

Bradshaw turned and walked into the dark office, and when Sullivan had followed him inside he closed the door. “They’re shy,” Bradshaw said. “So’s your dad. I’ll be back at the party.”

“Nicky, wait,” said Sullivan quickly. When the fat old man turned his impassive face toward him, he went on almost at random, “Have you got copies of the Alice books?
Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass?”

Bradshaw walked around to his desk and opened one of the drawers. After rummaging around, he looked up and called, “Catch,” and tossed a paperback toward Sullivan.

Sullivan did catch it, and he tilted it toward the light from the kitchen; it was both of the Alice books published together. “Thanks,” he said, tucking it into his

hip pocket.

Bradshaw left the building through the kitchen so as not to disturb the timid ghosts at their pebble buffet, and Sullivan sank cautiously into the Naugahyde chair in the middle of the office floor.

“You still got that brass plate from my gravestone?”
said the tiny voice of his father.

Sullivan slapped the front of his damp shirt, and felt the heavy angularity still there. “Huh! Yes.”

“Don’t lose it, I’m tethered to it. It’s my night-light. If I stray jar from it, I’ll get lost.”

Sullivan took it out of his pocket, then began unbuttoning his shirt.

“Do you know why I came hack, out of the sea?”
his father’s voice said.

“Because Thomas Edison lit up the sky here Monday night.” Sullivan slipped the brass plate down inside the soaked front-side wallet of his scapular and buttoned his shirt up again.

“That’s how I was able to find my way hack. That’s not why.”

Sullivan was shivering, and the cinnamon-and-rot smell of the office seemed to be infused with the smells of suntan lotion and mayonnaise. “Okay,” he whispered to the insect in his ear. “Why?”

“Because I…abandoned you and Elizabeth. I was a white-haired old fool showing off like a high-school Lothario, trying to impress this thirty-three-year-old girl I had married! With three-score and ten, I would have had nine more years with the two of you, seen you reach sixteen. But I had to be Leander, swimming…a Hellespont that turned out to be…well, I only just this week got back to shore.”

Sullivan’s eyes were closed, but tears were running down his cheeks. “Dad, you’re allowed to go swimming—”

“And I hoped that…that it would have been okay, that Kelley would have taken care of you two, and that you’d have grown up to be happy people. I hoped I would come ashore and find you both with…normal lives, you know? Children and houses and pets. Then I could have relaxed and felt that I had not done you any real harm by dying a little sooner than I should have.”

“I’m sorry we weren’t able to show you that.”

Sullivan was thinking of Sukie, drunk and grinning wickedly behind dark sunglasses in a late-night bar, perhaps singing one of her garbled songs; he thought of the way the two of them had watched out for each other through the lonely toster-home years, each always able to finish the other’s interrupted sentence; and he thought of the two of them running away from the sight of their father’s intolerable wallet on the Venice pavement in ‘86, running away separately to live as solitary shamed fugitives. And he imagined Sukie at forty years of age (he hadn’t even seen her since they’d both been thirty-four!) hanging up a telephone after having called Pete to warn him about deLarava’s pursuit—and then putting a gun to her head.

“Kelley Keith was to have been our stepmother,” Sullivan said aimlessly. “And she
did…adopt
us, in a way, after we got out of college.” He wondered if he meant to hurt his father by saying it; then he knew that he did, and he wondered why.

The gnat was just buzzing wordlessly. Finally it said,
“What can I do, what can I do? I’ve come back, and Elizabeth’s killed herself, she’s in the house of spirits with all the other restless dead, idiots jabbering over their pretend drinks and cigarettes. You’re a rootless bum. I gave you kids a mother that was—that was nothing more than a child herself, a greedy, mean, selfish child, and then I left you with her. And it’s wrecked you both. Why did I come back? What the hell can I
do?”

Sullivan stood up. “We’ve got to get back to the party.” He sighed. “What you can do…? Sukie and I let you down, even if you don’t see it that way, even if it plain
is not
that way. Tell us…that you don’t hold it against us; that there are no hard feelings. I bet Sukie will hear you too. Tell us that you…I-love us anyway.”

“I love you, Pete, and not ‘anyway.’ Don’t hold it against me, please, that I left you, that I abandoned you to that woman.”

“We never did, Dad. And we always loved you. We still do.”

The thing in his ear was buzzing indistinctly again, but after a moment it said,
“One last favor for your old man?”

Sullivan had crossed to the door, and paused with his hand on the knob. “Yes. Anything.”

“
See that I get back in the ocean tomorrow, on Halloween. Say goodbye to me willingly and at peace, and I’ll do the same. That’s the way we’ll do it this time. And then—Lord, boy, you’re forty years old! Stop running, stand your little ground.”

“I will, Dad,” Sullivan said. “Thanks.”

He opened the door. The humped ghosts were crouched around the plate, clumsily picking up pebbles, and they shifted but didn’t flee as Sullivan stepped around them and strode back toward the apartment. “You asked why you came back,” he said, “remember? I think you came back so that we could finally get this done.”

When they got back to the apartment, the pepperoni pizza was gone and everyone had started on the sausage-and-bell-pepper one. Sullivan took a piece of it with good enough grace, and he retrieved his beer.

Bradshaw and Johanna were standing by the window. Elizalde was sitting with Kootie and they were talking amiably; either it was Kootie animating the boy’s body now, or she had got finished yelling at Edison for getting the boy drunk.

“Join you two?” said Sullivan shyly, standing behind her with his beer and his paper plate. His father had flown away when they had reentered the hot apartment; Sullivan had seen the flicker of the gnat looping away toward Bradshaw, but he was no longer jealous.

“The electrical engineer!” said Kootie. Apparently he was still Edison.

Elizalde looked up at Sullivan with a rueful smile. “Sit down, Pete,” she said. “I’m sorry I got into my psych mode there.”

“I asked for it,” he said, folding his legs and sitting next to her. “And your questions were good. I’ve got answers to ‘em, too.”

“I’d like to hear them later.”

“You will, trust me.”

Sullivan guessed that Edison was still a bit drunk; the old man in the boy’s body resumed telling some interrupted story about restoring communications across a fogged, ice-jammed river by driving a locomotive down to the docks and using the steam whistle to toot Morse code across the ice to the far shore, where somebody finally figured out what he was up to and drew up a locomotive of their own so that messages could be sent back and forth across the gap. “Truly wireless,” Edison said, slurring his words. “Even electricless. We’re like the people on the opposite banks,
aren’t we? The gulf is torn across all our precious math, and it calls for a very wireless sort of communication to get our emotional accounts settled.” He blinked belligerently at Sullivan. “Isn’t that right, electrical engineer? Or did I drop a decimal place somewhere?”

“No, it sounds valid to me,” Sullivan said. “We’re…lucky, I guess, that you were there with a whistle that could be heard…across the gap.”

A
FTER AN
hour or so, Kootie’s body curled up asleep again, and Sullivan boxed up the remaining pizza and declared the party over. They all agreed to meet again early in the morning for a walk down to the beach, and then Bradshaw and Johanna plodded away toward the main building, hand in hand, and Elizalde told Sullivan to lock the door, and went into the bathroom to take a shower. When Sullivan leaned the Houdini hands against the closed door, he noticed that the broken finger had been glued back on. Elizalde must have borrowed glue from Johanna.

Sullivan took the Alice book out of his hip pocket and leaned against the kitchen counter to start reading it. When Elizalde came out of the steamy bathroom, wearing her relatively clean jumpsuit, she switched off the living-room chandelier and lay down on the floor near Kootie.

“Will this kitchen light keep you awake?” Sullivan asked quietly.

“An arc-welder wouldn’t keep me awake. Aren’t you…coming to bed?”

He raised the book.
“Alice in Wonderland
,” he said. “I’ll be along after a while, when I’m done with my homework.”

She stretched on the floor and yawned. “What were your answers to my pushy questions?”

He was tired, and the paperback book was jigging in his trembling fingers. He laid it face-down on the counter. “Here’s one. We are a family, rather than a partnership, if you would like us to be.”

She didn’t say anything, and her face was indistinct in the dark living room. Sullivan got the impression that his answer had surprised her, and pleased her, and frightened her, all at once.

“Let me sleep on that,” she said finally.

He picked up the book again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He stared at the page in front of him, but he wasn’t able to concentrate until she had shifted around to some apparently comfortable position; and her breathing had become regular and slow with sleep.

—Thomas Alva Edison,
Electrical Review,
August 8, 1903